Abstract
This and the next chapter look at how single poems and sequences triangulate a marriage on behalf of a larger social community. This chapter deals with processes of triangulation that are subjective and psychological. Sharon Olds emphasizes shame in the context of going public with the breakdown of her marriage. In Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree” the protagonist’s impending widowhood becomes a catalyst for self-distantiation. In Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife, a mid-life marriage is triangulated by emotional residue from both partners’ earlier marriages.
We tell you, tapping on our brows,
The story as it should be,—
As if the story of a house
Were told, or ever could be…
E. A. Robinson, “Eros Turannos”
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Notes
- 1.
In The New York Times Hannah Seligson (2014) reports that on Facebook “marital distress” is “the third rail, the untouchable topic … Perhaps,” she conjectures, “Facebook is actually mimicking the real-life personal dynamic, where once the vows are exchanged, the marital code of silence goes into effect.”
- 2.
The title of Sexton’s second volume , All My Pretty Ones, echoes Macduff’s anguished question, in the fourth act of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, when he learns that his wife and children are slain.
- 3.
In her essay on “Confessional” poetry for the Columbia History of American Poetry, Diane Middlebrook cites Plath’s use of this phrase to express admiration for both Lowell’s and Sexton’s “‘breakthrough’ into ‘very serious, very personal emotional experience.’” Middlebrook suggests that “family poetry” would be a more informative label for this body of work (1993, 646).
- 4.
Cf. Shanley (2004), 26–27.
- 5.
Ronald Reagan, the governor who signed the first no-fault divorce bill into law in September of 1969, and who had also been divorced, was elected president in 1980.
- 6.
I urge readers to go to Hollander’s Selected Poems to read the poem in its entirety; it has subtleties beyond those attended to here. It can also be found in a useful anthology of marriage poems that he curated for Everyman’s Pocket Library in 1997.
- 7.
Both in Othello and in his Sonnets, Shakespeare devastatingly puns on “lie” meaning “tell a falsehood” and “lie” meaning “have sex with.” “Therefore I lie with her and she with me,” he confesses in the couplet of sonnet 138: everything they do together, including their act of greatest intimacy, is false at the core.
- 8.
This wording cites an earlier ruling that had gone some way towards invalidating the Defense Of Marriage Act two terms earlier, in 2013.
- 9.
Mariani reports that Frank Bidart, who helped Lowell revise For Lizzie and Harriet at a point when The Dolphin also existed in draft form, shared this estimation of the importance of its subject, which for both of them outweighed the prospect of Lizzie’s distress. Bidart agreed with Lowell that what “posterity” would not forgive him for was “writing a bad book.”
- 10.
L’Amour et L’Occident was published in French in 1939 and in English translation in 1940.
- 11.
“Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree” was written shortly after Millay paid a visit to her ailing father, who had not lived with the family since she was a child; its “ungrafted” wife may well be modeled on her mother, who earned her livelihood as a nurse.
- 12.
Both of these sequences are fourteen poems long, but whereas a majority of the poems in “late wife: letters to Kent” are free verse sonnets, none of the “divorce epistles” are.
- 13.
Williams calls attention to the absence of shameful revelations in Emerson’s sequence: it is “without the messy lack of control that sometimes makes confessional poetry an embarrassment for readers (and perhaps, later, for the poets as well).”
- 14.
Emerson uses line breaks adroitly in this poem. “How I let the snake … [do what?] / escape,” is enjambed to make room for other predicates that might also be inferred.
- 15.
In the first poem of the sequence the wife recalls, from an earlier time in the marriage, a “blithe,” “big-aproned” version of herself “who planted seeds, musing ahead to their far blossoming.”
- 16.
In Thomas and Beulah, as we’ve seen in Chap. 4, Rita Dove keeps both of her protagonists in the moment by giving them talismanic accoutrements that age along with them. They become conscious of growing older not by thinking abstractly about Time, but by displacing their awareness of its passage onto these objects: Thomas’s mandolin, the silk scarf he gave Beulah when they were courting.
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Hedley, J. (2018). Triangulating the Marital Dyad. In: Modern Marriage and the Lyric Sequence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78157-0_7
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