The Wedding Couple by Donald Hall
How does one of the preceding works affect your understanding of real or true love? Use specific images in the poem to support your claim.
Till Death Do Us Part
“The Wedding Couple” is a poem by Donald Hall. It tells the story of a couple and the trials their love faces as they grow older together. This poem teaches a great deal about true love by demonstrating that true love is love that is persistent and unwavering through thick and thin.
The poem begins with an unnamed narrator speaking about an old but “vigorous and acute” (Hall 4-5) man who is somewhere around eighty years old. The man’s heart “infarcted” (2) fifteen years ago and thus he was forced to stop smoking as a result. The poem then flashes back to the couple’s wedding fifty years ago which the narrator attended as a “twelve”-year-old (7). The narrator describes the usual features of a wedding: the “white lace veil, the mumbling preacher, and the flowers” (8-9) as being pretentious and not worthy of as much attention as the couple who were getting married. Afterwards, the poem cuts back to the present and describes the strokes that turn her “into a mannequin” (16). However, despite his old age, the man still takes great and constant care of her, changing her clothes, washing her, and carrying her back to bed, all to the gratefulness of the woman.
Although this poem is quite short, it has a deep impact and helps me significantly with understanding how large the magnitude of love could be and what true love really means. The first stanza begins by telling how “fifteen years ago his heart/infarcted and he stopped smoking” (1-2). This line may act as a simple statement about a man who had to stop smoking because of his heart condition, but it also suggests the beginning of the decline of the man’s health and his ageing years. It continues by saying “at eighty he trembled/like a birch but remained vigorous/and acute” (3-5). These three lines show that the man...