Adrienne Rich's The Roofwalker is a wonderful piece of literature. The reader can read this poem from an archetypal critical approach or a feminist critical approach. Both these approaches can find evidence to sustain their critique, yet both can be debauched. I will show how to view The Roofwalker from an archetypal approach with slightly more emphasis on how to view the poem from a feminism approach.
             As in the beginning, so shall I start with the beginning. Below the title of the poem, there is a dedication: "for Denise Levertov." The beginning is a very important ideal that dates back to the beginning of time. A primordial image was formed in our consciousness that there was nothingness until God created earth. Denise Levertov is a recognized postwar British poet, poetry editor of "The Nation," and later, accepted as an important voice of poetry by using a simple idiomatic style to describe events from everyday life. Levertov's activism and feminism became a prominent part of her poetry in later years. She was also noted for her stylistic relationship of the lines in her poems that caused an almost pulsing rhythmic movement. A student from Capital Community-Technical College summed it up best by saying, "Denise Levertov's writings maintained a sense of natural rhythm as she shapes the intrinsic feeling of the poem into one expression of experience."
             Rich also encompasses this natural rhythm in the first stanza of The Roofwalker by giving the image of a ship on rough seas where "Giants, the roofwalker, on a listing deck," are bracing for "the wave of darkness about to break on heir heads." Unfortunately, experience would make the reader believe that the "roofwalker" and this "deck" are men, capable of withstanding the forces of nature. Since the feminist movement ha
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