Always Together—No Matter What
“A long marriage is two people trying to dance a duet and two solos at the same time”
~Anne Taylor Flemming
Without individuality and a united goal, a marriage cannot work for long; it is often difficult to balance one over the other, and often compromise between two people can impair their relationship and personality. “A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning” and “Conjoined” both examine inseparable lovers in crisis, separation in physical realm and connection in the spiritual, through metaphor and analogy and find two differing conclusions—happiness to never separate in spirit versus the need to escape the physical bonds holding lovers together .
In Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning” diction, analogies, and metaphors of death and true love creates a couple with ever-lasting love. The narrator speaking to his spouse wants no tears to be shed after parting from each other’s physical state(“valediction” means farewell, and “Forbidden Mourning” means grief is not to be publicized.). The diction used to describe an honorable man’s passing (“mildly”, “whisper their souls to go”, “no noise”) to set an example of how to part without a show; to have “tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests” would disgrace their love to allow “the laity” (common people) to know of their love—something which the average “sublunary” lover could not understand. They are below the heavens, where as these lovers are above them; the loved shared between the narrator and his significant other is spiritual as well as physical. When death seeks to separate average lovers from each other, they “cannot admit/Absence, because it doth remove/Those things that elemented it” meaning the physical state fuels the average man’s love, and when death robs the lovers of this, they cannot claim to miss their love because it was only a physical love, a love of a body not soul. But the narrator and his mistress “Care less, eyes, lips, and hand to miss” because their love, like the movement of heavenly bodies, is not just earthly. It expands to the heavens. The analogy of “two souls…which are one” calls to the western ideology that when to separate people marry, they become of one body and soul. These two lovers can never truly be separated—they are always connected, because they are of the same soul: When he must leave “endure not yet/A breach, but an expansion/Like gold to airy thinness beat.” Gold, the highest valued metal, can stretch and stay connected even when very thin, just like the souls of soul-mates. The last three stanzas are an extended metaphor of a geometrical compass swinging around, creating a perfect circle, the fixed foot being the significant other, and the moving foot being the narrator, traveling and coming home back to his loved one. The circle symbolizes the continuous promise a couple makes to each other and its unbroken nature; the narrator promises to always come home because his fixed point is his wife. “Valediction” is about the impossible nature of truly separating two soul mates.
Within “Conjoined,” the author makes analogies between freakish beings and a marriage. The poem describes the lack of individuality and space in the lovers’ marriage. The first image Minty presents is of “The onion in my cupboard, a monster, actually/two joined under one transparent skin”; by using the word monster, the reader derives ugliness from a conjoined onion. This in comparison to a marriage appears to be a contradiction because a perfect marriage is not ugly. However, in this poem, marriage became disgusting and unnatural. The transparent skin the couple finds themselves under constrains them, forcing them to rely on each other to the point that the two “[become] flat and deformed/where [they] pressed and grew against the other”. They are no longer two imperfect (and single) people, but a mutated and distorted form of themselves and as a marriage. They cannot be who they once were, or could have been, because marriage is compromise between two partners, and this forced them to become less of themselves and more reliant on the other.
She continues with “An accident, like the two headed calf rooted/in one body, fighting to suck at its mother’s teats”; the accident of the two headed calf is coupled with the accident to the marriage between the two lovers—the constraints of marriage cause more stress and tension and worry than if a person remained single with only one person to look out for, the self. The calf struggles for food and survival much like this married couple; fighting among themselves for what the individual wants rather than what they as a couple need. Minty takes this abstract conjoined life between two lower life forms to real people: “or like those other freaks, Chang and End, the twins/joined at the chest by skin and muscle, doomed/ to live, even make love, together for sixty years.” This documented case of Siamese twins makes their relationship all the more terrible—the twins who lived together, ate together, slept together, and could never separate due to potential death of one twin, resemble the narrator’s feeling towards her own marriage. It is an unbearable to be with the same person for over a length of time, and the twins were together for 60 years before they died together and fathered twenty-one children. This unusual relationship between brothers horrifies the narrator because she too feels the need for space in her relationship, but does not know how to achieve it: “Do you feel the skin that binds us/together as we move, heavy in this house?” It is confining this marriage, similar to the onion’s and Chang’s and Eng’s connection, that prevents growth in the narrator and her partner. There is no space to redevelop the individuality within their relationship. The heavy movement is the reluctance to acknowledge the issues in their union and address them. “To sever the muscle could free one,/but might kill the other” meaning that an end to their long standing (but flawed) relationship could cure the ailments of one, but permanently harm the other after separating. This could be if one was oblivious to the problems within the relationship: “Ah but men/don’t slice onions in the kitchen, seldom see/what it invisible.” Minty’s statement refers to the idea that men do not cook (and must stay out of the kitchen) and do no cry (an onion when cut releases chemicals causing one to cry to flush the eyes). Also, men are often times oblivious to the small details and miss the importance of something special (like an anniversary); this unconsciousness causes grief and makes the relationship’s problems seem invisible and insignificant. On a final note, Minty ends with the inevitable—“We cannot escape each other”—that their problems probably will not be address and both partners will fester in a relationship going nowhere, if not backwards. “Conjoined” is a pessimistic viewpoint on long-term relationships because partners may be more attentive to the needs of the couple over the need of individual freedom.
The poems contrast greatly because of the imagery of the heavens and spiritual connection, while the other is forced into physical contact with no room for individuality—one soul versus two unique beings pressing and suffocating the other. Although the poems examine similar subjects, “Conjoined” exposes the need to have space and individuality in a marriage, while “A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning” is a romantic marriage where individuality is impossible because once married a couple is of one body and soul. They both use similar techniques (metaphors) to convey their contradictory viewpoints; through them, the reader can see the difference between the two presented relationships—one romanticized, the other tortured.
