To My Wife
To My Wife - meaning Summary
Choice as Closing Possibility
The speaker reflects on how choosing a wife halted an earlier world of possibilities. Selection ends tempting potential and collapses 'all that elaborative nature' into a single present: the shared life. That intimacy is framed ambivalently; the beloved’s face replaces all others, and the relationship becomes the site of boredom, failure, and existential weight. The poem treats marriage as both resolution and new limitation, an acceptance that brings risk and diminished freedom.
Read Complete AnalysesChoice of you shuts up that peacock-fan The future was, in which temptingly spread All that elaborative nature can. Matchless potential! but unlimited Only so long as I elected nothing; Simply to choose stopped all ways up but one, And sent the tease-birds from the bushes flapping. No future now. I and you now, alone. So for your face I have exchanged all faces, For your few properties bargained the brisk Baggage, the mask-and-magic-man's regalia. Now you become my boredom and my failure, Another way of suffering, a risk, A heavier-than-air hypostasis.
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