Planetarium

While Rich avoids traditional formal structures of poetry, she utilizes white space on both sides of the page. Stanzas 7 and 11 are both indented so that there is the blank white space of the page on both the right and the left of them. These two stanzas, which contain two lines each, are about Tycho Brahe, and set him visually apart from the previous left-aligned stanzas about Caroline Herschel. Rich indents Stanza 16 the same amount as Stanzas 7 and 11, but Stanza 16 contains only one line. This one-line stanza introduces the first-person “I” (Line 34) of the poem.

In addition to the indentation at the beginning of Stanza 16, the stanza also has an indentation in the middle of it. There is extra white space before the “I” is repeated: “I am bombarded yet    I stand” (Line 34). Both occurrences of “I” are preceded by white space, setting the person—the woman—apart from the standard lineation. The “I” is like an isolated star, to use the language of celestial objects that is found in Rich’s poem. Stanza 16, a one-line stanza, reflects Stanza 6, which also has one line. Stanza 6 contains the homophone “An eye” (Line 17). In other words, “I” and “eye” sound alike, but are placed on different parts of the page, marking their distance and difference.

Another method that Rich uses to create white space is enjambment, or breaking lines in the middle of a sentence. Many lines in “Planetarium” are enjambed. For instance, the line break of Line 21 occurs after “exploding,” and separates it from the following stanza. Rich uses the white space of the line break, as well as the extra hard return, to visually reinforce her diction. The explosion wipes out words after it and directly below for a line. Rich even breaks one line in the middle of a word: “invo- / luted” (Lines 39-40). This enjambment is a way for the placement of the word on the page to reinforce its meaning. Involuted means overly complicated, and breaking the word across two lines makes reading more complicated.