Stepping Backward
Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow,
Next year and when I'm fifty; still good-by.
This is the leave we never really take.
If you were dead or gone to live in China
The event might draw your stature in my mind.
I should be forced to look upon you whole
The way we look upon the things we lose.
We see each other daily and in segments;
Parting might make us meet anew, entire.
You asked me once, and I could give no answer,
How far dare we throw off the daily ruse,
Official treacheries of face and name,
Have out our true identity? I could hazard
An answer now, if you are asking still.
We are a small and lonely human race
Showing no sign of mastering solitude
Out on this stony planet that we farm.
The most that we can do for one another
Is let our blunders and our blind mischances
Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion.
We might as well be truthful. I should say
They're luckiest who know they're not unique;
But only art or common interchange
Can teach that kindest truth. And even art
Can only hint at what disturbed a Melville
Or calmed a Mahler's frenzy; you and I
Still look from separate windows every morning
Upon the same white daylight in the square.
And when we come into each other's rooms
Once in awhile, encumbered and self-conscious,
We hover awkwardly about the threshold
And usually regret the visit later.
Perhaps the harshest fact is, only lovers--
And once in a while two with the grace of lovers--
Unlearn that clumsiness of rare intrusion
And let each other freely come and go.
Most of us shut too quickly into cupboards
The margin-scribbled books, the dried geranium,
The penny horoscope, letters never mailed.
The door may open, but the room is altered;
Not the same room we look from night and day.
It takes a late and slowly blooming wisdom
To learn that those we marked infallible
Are tragi-comic stumblers like ourselves.
The knowledge breeds reserve. We walk on tiptoe,
Demanding more than we know how to render.
Two-edged discovery hunts us finally down;
The human act will make us real again,
And then perhaps we come to know each other.
Let us return to imperfection's school.
No longer wandering after Plato's ghost,
Seeking the garden where all fruit is flawless,
We must at last renounce that ultimate blue
And take a walk in other kinds of weather.
The sourest apple makes its wry announcement
That imperfection has a certain tang.
Maybe we shouldn't turn our pockets out
To the last crumb or lingering bit of fluff,
But all we can confess of what we are
Has in it the defeat of isolation--
If not our own, then someone's, anyway.
So I come back to saying this good-by,
A sort of ceremony of my own,
This stepping backward for another glance.
Perhaps you'll say we need no ceremony,
Because we know each other, crack and flaw,
Like two irregular stones that fit together.
Yet still good-by, because we live by inches
And only sometimes see the full dimension.
Your stature's one I want to memorize--
Your whole level of being, to impose
On any other comers, man or woman.
I'd ask them that they carry what they are
With your particular bearing, as you wear
The flaws that make you both yourself and human.
Literary Analysis
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Summary
Adrienne Rich's poem begins with an apparently ordinary farewell, but the goodbye is quickly revealed as a way of thinking about how people actually know one another. The addressee is someone the poet expects to see again tomorrow, yet the repeated parting becomes a ritual of recognition: distance, even imagined distance, can make a person seem more complete than daily familiarity does. The poem moves from this intimate puzzle into a wider meditation on identity, solitude, and the ways art and human contact help people see themselves and each other more truthfully.
As the poem develops, the "you" becomes both a real companion and a stand-in for any person whose full self is hidden by routine. Rich argues that ordinary life encourages partial vision, polite evasions, and awkwardness, while love and honest exchange can briefly lift that veil. The final movement turns the farewell into a paradoxical compliment: the poet wants to preserve the other person's "stature," including the flaws that make that person distinct. The central tension is between closeness and separateness, between the desire to know someone fully and the fact that human beings can only ever glimpse one another "by inches."
Theme
- Familiarity and partial sight - The poem suggests that daily contact can make people seem fragmented or taken for granted, while absence or farewell can restore a fuller sense of who they are.
- Imperfection as human truth - Rich rejects the fantasy of flawless beings and treats flaws, awkwardness, and limitation as part of what makes human connection real.
- Solitude and companionship - The poem recognizes that loneliness is a basic human condition, but it also argues that shared imperfection and honest exchange can briefly defeat isolation.
- Love and privileged understanding - Romantic love appears as a rare condition in which two people can enter each other's inner lives without the usual self-consciousness.
- Art as recognition - Art is presented as one way of teaching people that they are not unique in their suffering or confusion, and therefore not alone.
- Truth versus social performance - The poem contrasts authentic identity with the "official" masks people wear in everyday life, questioning how much of the self can be safely revealed.
Literary Devices
- Extended metaphor - The farewell becomes a metaphor for deeper perception: stepping back allows the poet to see the beloved more fully, just as distance can sharpen emotional understanding.
- Paradox - The poem repeatedly uses paradoxes, such as saying goodbye to someone seen tomorrow, to show how emotional truth often contradicts ordinary logic.
- Address and apostrophe - Speaking directly to a "you" creates intimacy and makes the poem feel like a living conversation rather than a detached reflection.
- Free verse - The loose, flexible form suits the poem's meditative movement and allows the thought to unfold in a natural, searching way.
- Metaphor - Images such as a "stony planet" and "imperfection's school" turn abstract ideas about human life into vivid, memorable shapes.
- Allusion - References to Plato, Melville, and Mahler widen the poem's frame, linking private relationships to larger traditions of philosophy and art.
- Antithesis - The poem sets together oppositions such as closeness and distance, whole and segment, flaw and grace, to dramatize the complexity of knowing another person.
Symbolism
- Good-by - The repeated farewell symbolizes both literal parting and the mental act of stepping back in order to see another person more clearly.
- Rooms - The rooms stand for private inner lives, spaces that are only partly accessible even to those who know one another well.
- Threshold - The threshold symbolizes the uneasy boundary between intimacy and privacy, where people often hesitate and feel self-conscious.
- Books, geranium, horoscope, letters - These ordinary objects suggest the scattered, private fragments that make up a person's inner world.
- Plato's ghost - Plato's ideal forms symbolize the impossible wish for perfection and completeness in human life.
- The sourest apple - The apple stands for the mixed taste of experience, suggesting that imperfection has its own hard-won value.
Tone
Rich's tone is reflective, candid, and quietly argumentative, as if she is thinking aloud while testing the limits of affection and knowledge. Beneath that reasoned voice runs a tender insistence on human flaw and dignity. The mood for the reader is intimate but slightly unsettled: the poem feels warm in its regard for another person, yet it also carries the ache of distance, the embarrassment of self-consciousness, and the sobering sense that real understanding is always incomplete.
Historical Context
Adrienne Rich wrote as part of the mid- to late twentieth-century American literary world, where free verse, intellectual allusion, and personal address often worked together to question inherited ideas about identity and relationship. Her poetry is widely associated with close attention to gender, power, and the ways private life is shaped by social forms. In that broader context, this poem's concern with masks, roles, and the difficulty of genuine meeting fits Rich's larger interest in exposing what ordinary social life conceals.
The poem also draws on a long modern tradition of lyric self-scrutiny in which philosophical ideas are brought into conversation with daily experience. Its references to Plato and to major cultural figures place private feeling inside a larger history of thought and art, while its emphasis on imperfection reflects a distinctly modern skepticism toward idealized models of the self and of love.
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