The Theme Of Love In River Merchant's Wife

An intense feeling of deep affection, is what the English dictionary defines as love. Love is what consumes many people throughout their lives. t

To others it is known as 爱, and amour, and Liebe, and so on. The feeling of finding their “person” is what many people search for in their life. For some, this discovery happens when they are an adolescent, for others young adults, and sometimes some people don’t discover their true person till time has passed them by. While love can be an unforgettable journey, it can also lead to a dangerous rode of subordination taking over a lovers life. The intense, deep feeling of love can lead a person to ignore the signs that they have been unknowingly integrated into a life of submission to another person.

While the couple’s love in the poem according to the wife is “forever and forever and forever,” Ezra Pound’s “River Merchant’s Wife: A letter” uses imagery, form of free verse, and

Love can never truly be love when one of the partners involved are forced into it. Pound touches on this fact throughout the poem with the use of imagery not only through recurring symbols, but also with vivid images of the environment. In the first line of the poem Pound mentions the front gate of the wife’s as a sort of playground for her, a sanctuary so to speak. The wife as a young girl seems to show control over the gate’s environment by deciding how it should look. She is described to be “pulling flowers”, without a care in the world when she first encounters her husband who at the time was a child. The control the wife in her youth seems to have over this gate symbolizes the control she has in her life. The word “pulling” that Pound uses when describing the wife yanking out the flowers surrounding the gate symbolize the in voluntary pull into the marriage. This involuntary pull into the marriage is what they now have as a foundation. The gate emerges once again in the last stanza, “By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,” but with a completely different appearance. This untamed moss symbolizes the shift from the state of control the wife had when she was younger, to a now over grown or in other other words over emotional state. She seems to no longer have control over her own life, as she is a subordinate to the process of waiting for