The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter

Now this is a love poem. The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter expertly captures the true love of a wife after she was forced too. The poem is filled with incredible beauty that mimics the River Merchant's wife love for her husband.

"At fourteen I married My Lord you. / I never laughed, being bashful. / Lower my head, I looked at the wall. / Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back." This line shows the nature of how their love was formed. The wife was originally distant with the idea of marrying this man, probably because she was forced to do so for political or economical reasons, yet only a year later, she "stopped scowling". She changes and grows to realize that she does love this man.

The husband leaves (to find more work, I assume) to a place "by the river of swirling eddies". The swirling eddies can be a metaphor for the turmoil and danger that he went through, and judging from the fact that he's been gone for five months, he may have died. Even "the monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead" is a metaphor for the disappearance of him.

But the wife never stops loving. After all these signs of loss and death, she refuses to believe that her beloved husband has died. She is so persistent that she tells him to let her know if he is on his way back, so she can meet him and be with him sooner.

This is a really loving tale of a wife's loyalty to her husband. It reminds me a lot of Odysseus's wife, Penelope, when she refuses to belive that Odysseus is dead, and he was away for nearly 20 years! Penelope tricks her way out of picking a suitor out of incredible love and loyalty to Odysseus even though he can't possibly be alive.