Put Off The Wedding Five Times And Nobody Comes To It - Analysis

A poem made of advice it can’t quite give

The poem’s central claim is that no proverb is strong enough to repair a relationship once two people have decided to read each other in bad faith. The speaker begins in a posture of almost genial wisdom: I THOUGHT of offering you apothegms. He has a stack of ready-made sayings—about barking dogs, about making a “door of gold” one nail at a time—that promise simple, durable guidance. But the more he speaks, the more those neat capsules of wisdom feel like substitutes for the harder work of actually being understood.

The tone here is controlled, even a little showy: he can quote the world. Yet the title already hints at a darker undercurrent—delay, missed timing, and the public embarrassment of a ceremony nobody attends. From the start, this is not just about what to say; it’s about what happens when a private bond becomes a story other people shrug at.

The imagined farewell: grief treated like gossip

The poem’s first sharp turn comes when the speaker imagines what it “would have been” like to create a high impetuous moment before “final farewells.” He pictures the other person handling goodbyes like people buying newspapers, scanning “headlines,” and like “peddlers of gossip” who “wag their heads” and say, I heard all about it. That comparison is cruelly specific: the beloved (or estranged partner) is cast as someone who consumes emotional news the way you consume public scandal—quickly, with a practiced cynicism, already late to the real event.

There’s a key tension here: the speaker wants depth and ceremony, but he also sounds contemptuous, as if he’s already narrating the other person’s shallowness. The poem is partly a lament for lost intimacy, and partly a performance of superiority that may itself contribute to the distance.

When even “love” becomes an argument starter

The middle section shows the speaker testing moral language and watching it fail in advance. If he says There is no love but service, it becomes a fight about who served more, and “how and when.” If he says love stands against fire and flood, it becomes another “misunderstanding,” followed by “bickerings” and “lapses of silence.” The poem isn’t skeptical of love so much as skeptical of love-talk: phrases meant to unify have become triggers that sort the couple into opposing teams.

His questions—What is there in the Bible, or Shakespeare—sound grand, but they’re also desperate. He’s searching for an authority both of them might accept. Even Epictetus, the philosopher of endurance, appears less as enlightenment than as a last remaining tool in an emptied toolbox.

The hinge: silence and ashes as a chosen interpretation

The poem’s emotional hinge is the repeated Since you have already chosen. Here the speaker stops shopping for the right saying and confronts what he thinks is the real disaster: the other person has decided that silence equals “despair,” “contempt,” and all things but love. In his view, this isn’t a misunderstanding that happened accidentally; it’s an interpretive decision, a commitment to the bleakest translation.

“Ashes” intensify that bleakness. The beloved reads “ashes” where, the speaker insists, God knows there was something else. That line carries both tenderness and exasperation: he appeals to a witness beyond the couple, as if the relationship’s reality needs a higher court. Yet immediately after, he admits that for the other person, “silence and ashes” are “identical findings.” The phrase sounds like a legal or medical report—cold, final, filed away. And in that climate, apothegms are reduced to something like a hung jury's verdict: inconclusive, public, and unable to change what already happened.

Folk wisdom replaces scripture: the road, the sun, the empty wedding

After conceding that polished wisdom won’t work, the speaker doesn’t become wordless. Instead, he drops into memory—into sayings with dirt under their nails. A “Russian peasant” recalls a grandfather’s warning: ride too good a horse, and you won’t take the straight road to town. It’s a strange fit at first, but it suggests a relationship undone by speed, pride, or the intoxicating power of a “good horse”—something that feels like advantage but bends the route.

Then comes the “hokku” image: The heart of a woman of thirty like a red sun seen through mist. The line holds warmth and obstruction at once: the heart is bright, but difficult to see clearly; desire and doubt occupy the same weather. Finally, the poem lands on the Illinois barn dance, where a girl’s “witchery” delivers the title’s sentence: Put off the wedding five times. The advice is blunt, local, almost comic—yet it’s also the poem’s bleakest truth. Delay doesn’t just postpone commitment; it trains the world to stop believing in it, until the most intimate vow becomes a public non-event.

The hardest question the poem leaves behind

If the beloved has chosen to read “silence” as “contempt,” what has the speaker chosen—besides better sentences? The poem keeps insisting the other person is misreading, but it also shows a speaker who replaces direct speech with proverbs, philosophers, and remembered voices, as if he can’t risk saying plainly what he wants or what he did. In that sense, the tragedy may be mutual: not just silence mistaken for hatred, but language used as cover for fear.