The poet John Milton describes a marriage gone sour as “a drooping and disconsolate household captivity, without refuge or redemption,” and poet Carolyn Creedon says that a bad relationship feels like a “lovely, broken experiment.” Either way, for the first time, you're really afraid that the oft-quoted “half of all marriages end in divorce” (and probably
more
than half of live-in relationships) statistic applies to you.
It is not necessarily true that every relationship reaches this wretched point, but if you find yourself in this dark place, we think that reading these poems can help you figure out where you are and what you really want—they can actually help you assess your unhappiness. Perhaps you will recognize yourself in the comic exasperation of Marie Howe's “Marriage” and not in the tragedy of Sylvia Plath, but in either case this recognition can lead you toward the knowledge that the two of you need help.
In William Carlos Williams's “The Ivy Crown,” the speaker says that in love, “no doubts are permitted”; still, he warns us, they will come anyway, and if we are not careful, they “may before our time overwhelm us.” We think that these poems will help us face our doubts straight on—perhaps
before
we are overwhelmed by them and love is irrevocably lost.
Both “The More You Ruv Someone,” from
Avenue Q
, and Marie Howe's “Marriage” are horribly funny—and they both suggest that the flip side of any grand passion may well be rage. As the
Avenue Q
puppet character Christmas Eve tells fellow puppet character Kate Monster, “The more you love someone/The more you wishing/him dead!/Sometime you look at/him and only see fat and lazy./And wanting baseball bat/for hitting him on his head!”
In Marie Howe's “Marriage,” we are invited to feel a certain sympathy for the “strong woman” driven to bash her husband over the head with a bayonet. But maybe, these poems suggest, rage and despair can be overcome. In “The More You Ruv Someone,” we see that passion is intact, and perhaps the speaker in “Marriage” is simply warning us that too many evenings given over to the Discovery Channel can spark temporary insanity.
But perfection isn't the answer, either, Dorothy Parker tells us in the ironically titled “Love Song.” In fact, a bit of “fat and lazy” might be preferable to a guy who is “strong and bold,” as “jubilant as a flag unfurled,” and who lives “where the sunbeams start.” The speaker is bored, bored, bored with all this sweetness and light. In fact, she wishes “somebody'd shoot him.” If his imperfections are making us miserable, Parker's sly little poem advises us that even if perfection
were
possible (and of course, it isn't), we would still have times when we wished we'd “never met him.”
Okay, so we have (we hope) drawn you into this section with poems that leaven our anger, frustration, and despair with a bit of humor (see Gavin Ew art's “Ending” and Louise Glück's “Telemachus ' Detachment”). In Sylvia Plath's “The Rival” and Elizabeth Ash Vélez's “Cardinal Points,” no one is laughing. They both describe relationships that are airless, “drugged,” and false. “The Rival” fairly hums with the unhappiness of its speaker. Her “spiteful” lover—her rival (do recall that Plath's husband was fellow poet Ted Hughes)—is “beautiful, but annihilating.” The home they share is a “mausoleum,” where dissatisfactions are “as expansive as carbon monoxide” (and do recall that Plath killed herself after her marriage to Hughes fell apart). About as grim a love poem as you'll ever find.
The speaker in Vélez's “Cardinal Points” yearns for her past, a time when even the notion of winter was glamorous to her, when she read books in “a fever.” Now she feels like a character in a bad play; even her beloved books have become props in the creaking plot of her empty marriage. We hope that you
don't
recognize your life in these poems, but if you do, then it's time to talk, to see a therapist, to try again, or even to leave. Most of us have already learned that not every romance is meant to have a “happily ever after.” But we also know that
some
relationships survive betrayal, separation, and outright war (Bill and Hillary appear to soldier on).
Katharyn Howd Machan and Emily Dickinson suggest that at least part of our misery can be caused by our stubborn and unexamined belief in the fairytale myth of
true love
, which leads to impossible expectations. So in “Hazel Tells LaVerne,” we get a wonderful and funny deconstruction of the frog-who-needs-a-kiss-to-be-a-prince story:
an he says
kiss me just kiss me
once on the nose
well i screams
ya little green pervert
an i hitsm with my mop
And we think, yes, if your relationship is based on that particular fairy-tale model—if you believe that you can turn a frog into a prince and you'll live happily ever after—well, you don't necessarily have to hit him with your mop, but you probably should either radically readjust your expectations or move on.
Understanding that your pain is caused by impossible expectations is, in a strange way, a healthy kind of misery. The trick is not to give up on the reality of imperfect, human love. The speaker in Kate Bingham's “Sex”
has
given up. But we say no, you've experienced the “sweet impossible blossom” of ecstatic love and can reject your mother's horrifying advice that sex is the “closest a man and a woman could get/to wanting the same thing at the same time,” and that “this was love.”
Louise Bogan's advice in “Knowledge” is better than the mom's in Bingham's poem, we think. Even if it
seems
you've learned that “treasure is brittle” and “passion warms little,” don't give up on love. Let yourself lie back and reflect on something more distant from your pain—how “the trees make a long shadow/And a light sound,” for example.
So read these poems and take measure of your misery. Having faced what William Carlos Williams calls the “cruel and selfish and totally obtuse” part of love, you can, at least, decide where to go from here. We do know it's possible to get past the misery. In Jane Hirshfield's “Broken-Off Twig Budding Out in the Path,”
something
plops in the water. The speaker says that it may be “nothing/that swims,/nothing that hops, or hopes.” Or it
may
be “a thing/like this stick—/its red buds swelling out/in spite of what it/ought to know,/in spite of where it ought to be.” This poem tells us that spring (even misplaced) will always survive the misery of winter, and that love, like a “quickened water sprout,” can survive a season of unhappiness.
Relationship
What a silence, when you are here. What
a hellish silence.
You sit and I sit.
You lose and I lose.
JÁNOS PILINSZKY (T
RANS
. P
ETER
J
AY
)
The Ivy Crown
The whole process is a lie,
unless,
crowned by excess,
it break forcefully,
one way or another,
from its confinement—
or find a deeper well.
Antony and Cleopatra
were right;
they have shown
the way. I love you
or I do not live
at all.
Daffodil time
is past. This is
summer, summer!
the heart says,
and not even the full of it.
No doubts
are permitted—
though they will come
and may
before our time
overwhelm us.
We are only mortal
but being mortal
can defy our fate.
We may
by an outside chance
even win! We do not
look to see
jonquils and violets
come again
but there are,
still,
the roses!
Romance has no part in it.
The business of love is
cruelty
which
,
by our wills,
we transform
to live together.
It has its seasons,
for and against,
whatever the heart
fumbles in the dark
to assert
toward the end of May.
Just as the nature of briars
is to tear flesh,
I have proceeded
through them.
Keep
the briars out,
they say.
You cannot live
and keep free of
briars.
Children pick flowers.
Let them.
Though having them
in hand
they have no further use for them
but leave them crumpled
at the curb's edge.
At our age the imagination
across the sorry facts
lifts us
to make roses
stand before thorns.
Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse—
at least, blinded by the light,
young love is.
But we are older,
I to love
and you to be loved,
we have,
no matter how,
by our wills survived
to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our finger tips.
We will it so
and so it is
past all accident.
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
The More You Ruv Someone
from
Avenue Q
KATE MONSTER
Why can't people get along and
love each other, Christmas Eve?
CHRISTMAS EVE
You think getting along
same as loving?
Sometimes love right where you
hating most, Kate Monster.
KATE MONSTER
Huh?
CHRISTMAS EVE
THE MORE YOU LOVE SOMEONE,
THE MORE YOU WANT TO KILL 'EM.
THE MORE YOU LOVE SOMEONE
THE MORE HE MAKE YOU CRY
THOUGH YOU ARE TRY
FOR MAKING PEACE
WITH THEM AND LOVING,
THAT'S WHY YOU LOVE
SO STRONG YOU LIKE TO
MAKE HIM DIE!
THE MORE YOU LOVE SOMEONE
THE MORE HE MAKE YOU CRAZY.
THE MORE YOU LOVE SOMEONE
THE MORE YOU WISHING
HIM DEAD!
SOMETIME YOU LOOK AT
HIM AND ONLY SEE FAT AND LAZY.
AND WANTING BASEBALL BAT
FOR HITTING HIM ON HIS HEAD!
LOVE…
KATE MONSTER
LOVE…
CHRISTMAS EVE
AND HATE…
KATE MONSTER
AND HATE…
CHRISTMAS EVE
THEY LIKE TWO BROTHERS…
KATE MONSTER
BROTHERS…
CHRISTMAS EVE
WHO GO ON A DATE
KATE MONSTER
WHO…What?
CHRISTMAS EVE
WHERE ONE OF THEM GOES,
OTHER ONE FOLLOWS
YOU INVITING LOVE
HE ALSO BRINGING SORROWS.
KATE MONSTER
Ah, yes.
CHRISTMAS EVE
THE MORE YOU LOVE SOMEONE,
THE MORE YOU WANT TO KILL 'EM.
LOVING AND KILLING
FIT LIKE HAND IN GLOVE!
KATE MONSTER
Hand in glove.
SO IF THERE SOMEONE
YOU ARE WANTING
SO TO KILL 'EM,
YOU GO AND FIND HIM,
AND YOU GET HIM,
AND YOU NO KILL HIM,
CAUSE CHANCES GOOD
CHRISTMAS EVE
HE IS YOUR LOVE.
KATE MONSTER
(Simultaneously.)
HE IS MY LOVE.
ROBERT LOPEZ AND JEFF MARX
Marriage
My husband likes to watch the cooking shows, the building shows,
the Discovery Channel, and the surgery channel.
Last night, he told us about a man who came into the emergency room
with a bayonet stuck entirely through his skull and brain.
Did they get it out? We all asked.
They did. And the man was O.K. because the blade went exactly between
the two halves without severing them.
And who had shoved this bayonet into the man's head? His wife.
A strong woman, someone said. And everyone else agreed.
MARIE HOWE
Love Song
My own dear love, he is strong and bold
And he cares not what comes after.
His words ring sweet as a chime of gold,
And his eyes are lit with laughter.
He is jubilant as a flag unfurled—
Oh, a girl, she'd not forget him.
My own dear love, he is all my world—
And I wish I'd never met him.
My love, he's mad, and my love, he's fleet,
And a wild young wood-thing bore him!
The ways are fair to his roaming feet,
And the skies are sunlit for him.
As sharply sweet to my heart he seems
As the fragrance of acacia.
My own dear love, he is all my dreams—
And I wish he were in Asia.
My love runs by like a day in June,
And he makes no friends of sorrows.
He'll tread his galloping rigadoon
In the pathway of the morrows.
He'll live his days where the sunbeams start,
Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
My own dear love, he is all my heart—
And I wish somebody'd shoot him.
DOROTHY PARKER
Ending
The love we thought would never stop
now cools like a congealing chop.
The kisses that were hot as curry
are bird-pecks taken in a hurry.
The hands that held electric charges
now lie inert as four moored barges.
The feet that ran to meet a date
are running slow and running late.
The eyes that shone and seldom shut
are victims of a power cut.
The parts that then transmitted joy
are now reserved and cold and coy.
Romance, expected once to stay,
has left a note saying
GONE AWAY
.
GAVIN EWART
Telemachus' Detachment
When I was a child looking
at my parents' lives, you know
what I thought? I thought
heartbreaking. Now I think
heartbreaking, but also
insane. Also
very funny.
LOUISE GLÜCK
The Rival
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.