Abstract
This chapter looks briefly at poetry written in anticipation and in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s affirmation of same-sex couples’ right to marry. Gay poets, too, are found to thematize the relationship’s temporal contours, the importance of dialogue, and the couple’s stake in a public affirmation of their union. Behind Paul Monette’s Love Alone, a sequence of elegies for a relationship that would, if it could, have been a marriage, stands Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” which in turn hearkens back to the “marriage of true minds” in Shakespeare’s sonnets.
It’s our house Rog I’ve got all the papers
so what if the legalese says single man
and single man beside our separate names
Paul Monette, Love Alone
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Notes
- 1.
Hollander’s anti-epithalamion “For Both of You, the Divorce Being Final” is discussed in Chap. 7.
- 2.
The New Yorker omitted a dedication to Barry Bergdoll and Bill Ryall that would have alerted the poem’s readers to whose marriage is in the offing right from the outset; that said, the choice to speak of everything else but their marriage until the very end of the poem is conspicuous either way.
- 3.
The phrase “where peace comes dropping slow” claims the tradition of literary pastoral by echoing W. B. Yeats’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree.”
- 4.
This poem is discussed in Chap. 3.
- 5.
The event these lines allude to was a visit to the town by Justice Sotomayor, who read out the Bill of Rights during Fourth of July festivities in 2016. For readers who don’t live in Orient, however, the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges is a readily available subtext for the reference to “our rights” in this context.
- 6.
I am indebted to the author for this and other helpful information about the poem.
- 7.
Tennyson’s poems have many other interlocutors also, including the deity whose mysterious ways he seeks to affirm in spite of having found his friend’s early death so hard to accept.
- 8.
Craft adduces Tennyson’s own comment, cited in Christopher Ricks’s 1972 biography, on the first line of poem 122 (“O wast thou with me, dearest, then”): “If anybody thinks I ever called him ‘dearest’ in his life they are much mistaken, for I never even called him ‘dear’” (ctd. Craft, 52–53).
- 9.
In “The Ache of Marriage,” cited in Chap. 1, Denise Levertov adduces Noah’s ark as a figure for the institution itself.
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Hedley, J. (2018). Gay Marriage: Something Old, Something New. In: Modern Marriage and the Lyric Sequence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78157-0_9
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