Marriage
...of meaning that reaches between it and dream. It is a purely verbal consideration:
This institution,
perhaps one should say enterprise
out of respect for which
one says one need not change one's mind
about a thing one has believed in,
requiring public promises
of one's intention
to fulfill a private obligation.
Enter Adam and Eve, not as immediate protagonists, but as absent mentors who, having been the first to propose conjugal bliss, so the myth has it, might have some useful observation to make. Their answer is of course entirely a matter of our own imaginations. It is really we who are asked to reflect on the glint of a wedding ring and some cynical words drawn from Francis Bacon. Not love, but an "enterprise," is the center of attention as the poet wonders
what Adam and Eve
think of it by this time,
this fire-gilt steel
alive with goldenness;
how bright it shows—
"of circular traditions and impostures,
committing many spoils,"
requiring all one's criminal ingenuity
to avoid!
Moore's quotation of Bacon, so aptly placed for rendering the symbol of love into an image of social greed, and the eternal circle into an image of unprogressive self-interest, applies as much to a style of writing and speaking as it does to the life style of prospective husbands and wives. Social mores, ingenious in the enshrinement of the original felix culpa, must be fought with like ingenuity. What Adam and Eve might think of it is certainly no consolation.
The "hand" that is offered the reader in "Marriage" is, like the hand offered in marriage described by the poem, "impatient to assure you" that its groping is free of obligation. Whatever they say, though, both poet and lover know that this is not true. The poet beginning an ambitious poem is not unlike the applicant for marriage in that there is an obligation to fulfill at least...
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