In the poem by Eavan Boland from which my epigraph is taken, an eighteenth-century English silversmith takes an Irish commission for a commemorative marriage spoon. The marrying couple is depicted in miniature on the spoonâs handle: âHistory frowns on them,â the poem tells us, âyet in its gaze, / They join their injured hands and make their vows.â The silversmithâs craft, as she âchasesâ and marks the spoon, is a âcraft of hurtâ that for Boland becomes emblematic of a âmediation / Between oppression and loveâs remembranceâ whose difficulty belongs not only to the history of EnglishâIrish relations, but to the history of marriage and of her own craft of poetry (Boland 2001a, 3â4). Boland wrote this and other poems that were later collected in Against Love Poetry from a conviction that love poetry as we have known it since the Renaissance âcan do no justiceâ to âthe contradictions of a daily love.â It is, however, from within such a love that she has seen, as she puts it, âmy full humanity look back at meâ (Boland 2001c, 5).
A kindred take on the difficult complexity of the marriage relation emerges from âThe Ache of Marriage,â by Denise Levertov. We go into marriage, her poem suggests, âlooking for joy, some joy / not to be known outside itâ; but âsome joyâ is a place-holder for what we canât really know until we are inside marriage, and even thenâespecially thenâwhat we are looking for proves elusive: âWe look for communion, / and are turned away, beloved, / each and each âŠâ Instead of âsome joy,â perforce abstractly posited, what we get is âthe ark of / the ache of it,â phrases carefully chosen for their not-quite homonymity. The ache of marriage is intimate, bodily, and concrete: âthigh and tongue, beloved, / are heavy with it, / it throbs in the teethâ (Levertov 1964, 184). Would we then be better off without this ark that we enter two by two with such foolish optimism, this ostensibly transformative covenant that is not transformative enough? Or does Levertov agree with Boland that only in the contradictions of a daily love is our full humanity disclosed to us? A short, stand-alone poem can pose such questions vividly: just reading Levertovâs poem, I ache a little.
This bookâs subject is marriage poetryâmore specifically, how English and American poets have used poems and poetic sequences to get inside marriage and make it âknowable.â We have a number of single poems that do this arrestingly and memorably: I will be citing them in due course for the conundrums and paradoxes, the metaphors and sound-shapes they bring to the making of a match between art and marriage. But it is in lyric sequences, I will suggest, that modern and contemporary poets, both female and male, have found the genre best suited to an inside perspective on the marriage relation.
In our own cultural moment that relation is the focus simultaneously of idealization and disillusionment, public interest and personal obsession. The most popular article of 2016 in the New York Times was an Opinion piece by Alain de Botton, author of a number of best-selling books about love, entitled âWhy You Will Marry the Wrong Personâ (Botton 2016). âThe divorce rate may be dismal,â announced the Huffington Post in 2014, âbut remarriage is on the riseâ: in forty percent of new marriages, one of the spouses is marrying for the second time (Adams 2014). Young people are waiting longer and longer to tie the knot, yet in 2010 three quarters of the respondents to a survey of high school seniors said they considered marriage to be âextremely importantâââa number that [had] remained virtually unchanged since scholars first began assessing it in the 1970sâ (Finkel et al. 2014, 6). A ten-year-old study of American adolescents finds most continuing to believe âthat cohabitation cannot substitute for marriageâ (ibid.), and more recently the gay marriage movement has been sending the same message: after the Supreme Court affirmed their right to marry in 2015, many same-sex couples who were already co-habiting chose to marry. Lavish traditional weddings are back in vogue and our news media are full of information about themânot only celebrity marriages, but those of ordinary couples whose wedding stories make them celebrities for a day in the Lifestyles section of the newspaper. Survey data suggests, moreover, that âdespite the elevated marital challenges confronting poor, uneducated, and racial minority Americans, members of such groups remain highly respectful of and optimistic about the institution [of marriage]â (Finkel et al. 2014, 6). As a society we appear to believe that it bears a close relationship to human flourishing, even though the partnership it creates is by no means easy to get right or do well.
Whence this continuing respect for marriage, this persistent, widespread aspiration to marry? We do it for a variety of reasons: to claim adulthood, to build a family, to acquire spousal benefits, to make a romantic commitment in the presence of friends and neighbors. But historians of marriage suggest that in the United States and most European countries over the past 200 years a seismic shift in priorities has taken place. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, âmarriage was primarily oriented toward helping spouses meet their economic, political, and pragmatic goals,â but gradually a different set of goals became more salient: sexual intimacy, emotional companionship, childrenâs wellbeing (Finkel et al. 2014, 2). Since the middle of the twentieth century, womenâs increasing economic independence and the availability of âno-faultâ divorce have assisted yet another set of priorities to emerge: self-fulfillment and personal growth. There has been a two-fold shift in emphasis: from societyâs interests to those of the couple and their children, and from practical survival needs to âthe psychological needs of individual spousesâ (Amato et al. 2009, 70).
The history of marriage poetry, both in the United States and in Britain, tracks with this shift. Until the nineteenth century, poems about marriage were for the most part epideicticâconcerned, that is, with the institution and its importance for the society at large. Heather Dubrow explains in A Happier Eden, her study of the Stuart epithalamium, that Renaissance wedding poems approached the marriage relation ânot merely as the link between two peopleâ but as a linchpin of social stability (Dubrow 1990, 10). At a time of political uncertainty and accelerated social change, the epithalamium helped to manage anxieties about âsocial roles in general and gender roles in particularâ by telling a story the society âwish[ed] and need[ed] to tell about itself â (ibid., 61, 41). But that story was all about the institution of marriage; these poems did not take on the day-to-day experience of married life. The âPetrarchanâ sonnet sequence, which flourished in England during the 1590s and for a couple of decades thereafter, might conceivably have done so given its association with the inmost workings of a loverâs heart and mind. âFool, said my Muse to me, / Look in thy heart and write,â says âAstrophilâ at the outset of Sir Philip Sidneyâs lively, influential sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella. But the love that be-fooled and bedeviled Sidneyâs protagonist, making him âgreat with child to speakâ of it in sonnet after sonnet, was an extra-marital experience, as it had been in Petrarchâs Rime sparse.1 And by 1650 the English vogue for the Petrarchan sequence had run its course: amatory sequences were no longer being written in English. During the âlongâ eighteenth century, as William C. Horne explains, poems about marriage continued to be concerned with advocacy, celebration and satire rather than lived experience (Horne 1993).
Thus George Meredith was breaking new ground in 1862 with âModern Love,â a sequence of sixteen-line âsonnetsâ that tracks the breakdown of a bourgeois companionate marriage. Meredithâs sequence is from the standpoint of the husband, but with considerable attention to the wifeâs perspective and to the marriage relation itself, understood as a shifting dance of intimacy and estrangement. By the time he published it the amatory sonnet sequence was having a renascence in England, and he was not the first to substitute married lovers for its traditionally unmarried prota...