The Wife

Summary


In "The Wife," a short poem by Emily Dickinson, a young woman sets aside the playthings of her girlhood to take up the "honorable work" of being a wife. The poem lingers on what she may have lost in the exchange: wonder, ambition, and the gleam of early promise. She never speaks of it. Dickinson compares her silence to the sea, which grows pearl and weed in depths that only the sea itself knows.

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SHE rose to his requirement, dropped
The playthings of her life
To take the honorable work
Of woman and of wife.

If aught she missed in her new day
Of amplitude, or awe,
Or first prospective, or the gold
In using wore away,

It lay unmentioned, as the sea
Develops pearl and weed,
But only to himself is known
The fathoms they abide.


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Credits

Emily Dickinson was a reclusive nineteenth-century American poet from Amherst, Massachusetts, famed for her compressed, dash-filled verse. "The Wife" shows her sharp, quiet eye for the unspoken costs of marriage, using her favorite imagery of the sea and its hidden depths.