Poems that Celebrate Long Marriages

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Sunday

My wife and I renew our wedding vows today, with Julia observing that “in sickness and in health” looks different at 72 than it did at 22. While I won’t be bringing poetry into this ceremony as I did into our wedding—today’s affirmation has just been folded into the Episcopal Church’s regular service—the occasion calls for a poem here. I’ve struggled with which one to use, however.

Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife” came to mind as a poem I’ve loved ever since I encountered it in high school. In it, we see a shy young woman—she’s 14 when she gets married to “My Lord you”—grow into her marriage. Unable at first to even look at her husband so that she keeps her eyes affixed to the garden wall, she evolves to desiring that “my dust to be mingled with yours/ Forever and forever, and forever.”

She’s still a teenager in the poem, however. I wanted a longer lasting relationship.

I found one in W. B. Yeats’s “When You Are Old,” written to his muse Maud Gonne. Fantasizing that she will miss him some day, he claims that he is the only man “who loved the pilgrim soul in you/ And loved the sorrows of your changing face.” But I passed up this poem as well since, of course, they are not together.

Of course, there’s Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116.” A popular favorite at weddings with its declaration that “Love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds,” the lyrics works as a test of those early aspirations. Read early in life, it expresses a hope, read late, an assessment: Has loved indeed proved to have been “an ever-fixed mark/ That look[ed] on tempests and [was] never shaken”?

I have chosen two poems with speakers who, having themselves experienced long-term marriages, describe the impact of life’s storms on the relationship. Looking back at 40 years, Stanley Kunitz defiantly dares the tempest to do its worst: “So let the battered old willow/ thrash against the windowpanes/ and the house timbers creak.”

Whence comes this assurance? Comparing his marriage to the crickets he hears around him while gardening, he declares that brave music has poured from this “small machine,” which even after all these years is driven by “desire, desire, desire” and “the longing for the dance.” Although we have but one season and the winds are scattering our leaves, nevertheless his wife has the ability to invoke his essential core. “Touch me, remind me who I am.”

Touch Me
By Stanley Kunitz

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

If Kunitz feels like a house battered by a tempest-tossed willow, then U.A. Fanthorpe in “Atlas” lists what keeps the house from falling apart. A number of unglamorous but essential details uphold “the permanently rickety elaborate structures of living.”

By invoking Atlas, who held the world on his shoulders, Fanthorpe finds something mythical in the “kind of love called maintenance.” This aspect of marriage may not get acknowledged in the early years, but after fifty one learns to appreciate someone who

         knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting…

The poet’s partner is his Atlas. As Julia is mine and I hers.

Atlas
By U.A. Fanthorpe

There is a kind of love called maintenance
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;

Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget
The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;

Which answers letters; which knows the way
The money goes; which deals with dentists

And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains,
And postcards to the lonely; which upholds

The permanently rickety elaborate
Structures of living, which is Atlas.

And maintenance is the sensible side of love,
Which knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps
My suspect edifice upright in air,
As Atlas did the sky.