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...
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…
