The Betrothed - Analysis

The cigar-box as a courtroom

Kipling builds the poem as a mock-deliberation: the speaker tells himself to Open the old cigar-box the way someone might ask for a moment alone before making a life decision. The stated problem is a lovers’ quarrel—Maggie and I are out—but the “evidence” he weighs isn’t shared memories or remorse. It’s brands, textures, and routines: a Cuba stout, a good cheroot, the soft blue veil of smoke. The cigar-box becomes a private court where nicotine gets to argue against intimacy, and where the speaker can postpone emotional responsibility by turning it into selection and consumption.

The tone is breezy and performatively reasonable—he is “considering”—yet the poem keeps revealing how much that calm depends on reducing Maggie to a problem of upkeep. Even the first fight is tellingly trivial and transactional: they quarrelled about Havanas. Love begins as a dispute over taste, money, and control.

When love becomes a perishable good

The poem’s central metaphor is blunt: cigars are stand-ins for women, and smoking is a model for attachment. The speaker admits Maggie is pretty to look at and a loving lass, but immediately insists that the prettiest cheeks must wrinkle and the truest of loves must pass. What he calls realism is also an excuse: if love inevitably “passes,” then treating partners like consumables begins to look like prudence.

Here the poem hits a key tension: cigars are praised for delivering peace and calm, yet they are literally designed to be finished and thrown away. Marriage, by contrast, can’t be tossed aside without consequence—he can’t throw away Maggie because of the talk o’ the town. So the speaker wants the comfort of permanence without the permanence of commitment. His “logic” is an attempt to make a spouse behave like a luxury item: soothing when lit, disposable when stale.

The nightmare of the dead cigar

The poem’s most vivid swerve is the future-vision of marriage as decay. Maggie becomes my wife at fifty, imagined as grey and dour and old, and time itself turns sour: Days that have Been darken Days that Are. Love’s symbol—its torch—doesn’t go out with dignity; it becomes stinking and stale, like the butt of a dead cigar you are bound to keep. This is not just fear of aging. It’s fear of obligation: the horror is being “bound,” pocketing what’s charred, carrying yesterday’s choice as a constant, embarrassing object.

That language also exposes the speaker’s cruelty. The comparison doesn’t merely say love can fade; it imagines the wife as refuse you’re forced to keep. The poem’s wit is real, but it’s weaponized—humor used to make emotional disposability feel like common sense.

The fantasy of fifty brides and the economics of replacement

After the “dead cigar” image, the speaker swings hard into a compensating fantasy: not one Maggie, but fifty tied in a string, a harem that will offer Thought, solace, Peace, and balm while asking nought in return. The list is seductive because it promises all the functions of companionship without the one thing companionship requires: mutuality. His “wives” are really service instruments, praised as Counsellors and comforters precisely because they won’t sneer at a rival bride.

The poem pointedly links this to global supply chains: Java and the Spanish Main will send me my brides again when the harem is “empty.” Cigars arrive from colonies and trade routes; so does the speaker’s imagined feminine replacement. The line When they are spent and dead makes the moral ugliness impossible to miss. Consumption is the governing ethic, and everything—women, labor, even tenderness—gets translated into replenishable stock.

Love as will-o’-the-wisp, tobacco as religion

Near the end, the poem briefly becomes almost candid. Maggie forces a choice between Love and Nick o’ Teen, and the speaker admits his history: servant of Love for barely a twelvemonth, but Priest of Cabanas for seven year. That religious language is more than a joke; it tells you where his allegiance has been trained. He even remembers his bachelor life as lit by cigars offered to Friendship and Pleasure and Work and Fight. Tobacco isn’t a habit here—it’s identity, ritual, and refuge.

Against that, Love appears as a Will-o’-the-Wisp over marshes, a light that may leave me bogged in the mire. The fear is not just heartbreak; it’s vulnerability and loss of control. Yet the poem undercuts him: if a puff of tobacco can cloud that light, maybe the problem isn’t Love’s unreliability but the speaker’s dependence.

The final vow: choosing smoke over a person

The ending is a hard snap back into bravado: a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke. The line is meant to land like a punchline, yet it also reveals the poem’s bleakest claim: he prefers what vanishes to what endures, because what endures can demand accountability. By lighting another Cuba and declaring I’ll have no Maggie for Spouse, he frames rejection as fidelity—to first-sworn vows—as if addiction were a marriage more honorable than marriage itself.

The poem’s real subject is not a lovers’ spat but a philosophy of replaceability. Cigars offer controlled pleasure with a clean ending; Maggie represents a life where pleasure must share space with time, change, and another will. The poem lets the speaker “win” his argument, but it also leaves his victory smelling faintly of ash.