She posted this poem about marriage during our month of so-called bliss, a year or so ago last April -- and like the poem with me as the one eyed pirate, she included a warning about who she is and what she wants and what she does not want. At the time, the poem appeared more or less innocuous though looking at it through the lens of a year and considering some of her other poems printed since this poem has a haunting quality.
In a later poem, posted last August she compared marriage to death saying she had bought the farm once, a harsh retrospect of her life after a bitter and brutal struggle with me over the previous summer.
yet this poem posted in April demonstrates that her view of marriage as a trap did not come out of that conflict. She seems to have been wary of the institution well before that, something of an irony considering the several of love poems she posted earlier this year and also explaining why she hesitated when her lover apparently offered to join her in that sacred union. As much in love as she appeared to be, she refused to give up her own identity, a philosophy penned in the poem from April 2012 when she seemed to prefer being the bride’s maid as opposed to the bride.
Playing off the old cliche about a bridesmaid never a bride she contemplates just who actually is better off in the end. While the concubine, the loyal supporters decked out in garish dresses do not get the attention or the presents, she asks what is behind their desire to become brides. She points out that the sacrificial lamb always wears white, and it is the troops in the trenches who earn their way fighting the good fight, making strides to change the times.
Wives after their brief honeymoon get to do laundry and the hard labor that comes as a result of marriage.
The poem of course is not merely about marriage but the concept of success as well, about those who get all the attention on their way to achieving their place in the world and she having not yet achieved these looks on envious the way a fox does when looking up at grapes hanging too high to reach and concluding that the grapes are probably sour.
Her need to get what she thinks she deserves in the world makes her question the key nature of success, how while she may be up to her neck in dirt and sweat the bride's glory is only momentary and soon falls into perhaps a more miserable fate.
The whole pageantry is like cheese in a rat trap once the rat devours the cheese the trap springs and she is forever caught in a life perhaps more miserable than any of the bridesmaids.
Success she concludes, is a dubious thing and perhaps not worth achieving, at least not in the way society paints it.
The poem leaves the question as to whether there is another way to achieve success to become the bride without being trapped in the life of perpetual servitude.
It is not a question she answers in this poem anyway
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