Poetry Is Often Used to Express Emotion

Poetry is often used to express emotion at its most romantic and infatuated, but sometimes it is used to describe the pillars of life behind that romance -- the sexuality, insecurity, devotion, and fidelity. Dorianne Laux, Anne Bradstreet, and Barbara Greenberg explore their very different relationships through poetry, examining this causal underpinnings through poetry. Using careful word choice, expressive imagery, and specific audience, each poet expertly wields her tool to limn the life of the relationship inside the life of a partner.

Dorianne Laux treats the elaborate prose of "The Shipfitter's Wife" as a rosetta stone to the relationship she and her lover share as an escape from and culmination to the demands of the hard day's work that characterizes life tied directly to the ocean. Her meter is perpetually changing, but a constant alliteration and consonance carries the reader through the caesura distinguishing the stream of descriptions, one from the next. The words slur together, "from fitting" [3] to "his denim shirt ringed with sweat/and smelling of salt" [4].

She suffuses the stead stream of s-sounds with hard consonance, particularly with c/k sounds; "cracked hands" [8], "stroke his ankles" [10] "copper pipe." [14] The words themselves slide around in the reader's mouth like a ship in the water, sloshing back and forth on the water's crest and hitting metal like the husband in the poem does.

The narrator's introspective reflection on the nature of her sexual passion for her husband is intricately tied to the words she uses to describe his job, and physically remove him, piece by piece, "gray sides, the miles of copper pipe" [14] from his day, making it hers; sharing her body with him and taking part of his day for herself. The relationship is symbiotic, and Laux reinforces this relationship between the husband and wife with a parallel between word and action.

The imagery is plentiful, invigorated with the passion of the two lovers' retreat to their own private world. Bradstreet's "To My Dear and Loving Husband" is a lyrical poem written in shifting meter in an A-A, B-B, C-C, D-D, E-E, F-F sequence. Bradstreet carefully chooses not only the rhythm of the poem to get her meaning across to the reader, or, more specifically, the audience, but also very specific word choice.

The sing-song flow of the poem is disrupted by uneven syllabic matching, which she uses to draw attention to the next line and bring the reader back in.

"If ever wife was happy in a man/Compare with me, ye women, if you can." [4] The sudden shift to an 8 count draws the reader out of the flow and back to the poem, perhaps to highlight the direction of the poem to an audience of not her lover nor herself, but to a group of other women, all woman on the whole. Bradstreet writes with a bragging pride about her love of her husband, and decrees it to other women that they could not compare.

This is done with such little humility that it is clear it is done to express an inset insecurity; essentially, the narrator is asking for a love she does not have, or fears she does not actually have, by proclaiming it to be true. This insecurity is revealed in the careful word-choice: "Nor ought but love from the ..

" [8] Ought is a fascinating word to use, since the Oxford English Dictionary attributes both the meanings "nothing" and "should" to it; reworked, she says: "nothing but love from thee," or "should love from thee," both implying a desire or need for something not actually present. This miniscule separation from proclamation to insecurity is again revealed in " .. I pray." [10] She is not able to truly show her love to him; loving him back is not enough, perhaps because his love is not there fully to be returned.

"The Faithful Wife" is written in a plain-speak prose, more casual than the previous two poems. The tone is so simple, in fact, that it fits to think that Greenberg would stand at the mirror, brushing her teeth, and thinking this poem to herself -- more than all else, it is a train of thought. She writes in the first-person and to her lover, whom the reader can presume is a lover in a committed, if not official, respect.

The tone is direct, but hidden with a world full of litotes, and subtle understatements; she uses the literary tool to reinforce the delicacy of the meaning of the poem. There is no direct rhythm or meter followed throughout the poem, although each line is spliced with caesura, reinforcing the natural tone of the poem. There is a noticeable lack of consonance and enjambment, allowing for an easy flow between the words and lines.

The simple cadence of the prose is important, because Greenberg uses it to reach around the words and cloth the poem in intimate perspective. The construction of the poem makes evident to the reader that while the poem is to be read, the reader is the silent observer in a small room of conversation between two people intimately, and lovingly, connected; the observer has no voice, but is instead present to witness a quiet intimacy.

Greenberg begins the poem by saying, "But if I were to have a lover, it would be someone/who could take nothing form you." [1] The poem continues to describe how, if she were to take another lover, the lover would do none of the things she and the addressee do; they would speak a language, wear colors, and enjoy activities that the addressee is either unable to or does not enjoy.

"He and I would speak/Spanish, which is not your tongue, and we would take/long walks in fields of burdock, to which you are allergic." [13] If she were to take another lover, the lover would be nothing like the current one. But the word choice of.