The Speaker
The speaker of “Cozy Apologia” is in love, but this love is not built on fiery, ephemeral passions. The speaker seems to have strong ties both to the real, concrete world and to the imaginary one; she lists objects like computers, faxes, hardwood floors, and compact discs in a way that reflects her familiarity with them. However, she also daydreams a scene where her lover is a knight in shining armor, and she is in need of rescue. These two extremes—the commonplace and the whimsical—act as bookends around her feelings for her partner. Their love perhaps has more to do with a fax machine than it does with a dragon-slaying knight, but it retains an elusive and magical quality because it is so simple and so ordinary yet so good.
The speaker also thinks back to relationships she had as a teenager with "worthless boys." Clearly she had a romantic life before meeting her current partner, but those boys are located so firmly in the past that they blur together and become watery and faceless. She remembers only their sweetness and their hollowness, not any weighty emotional moments nor any painful ones.
Fred
The poem begins with the simple dedication “For Fred.” Since the poet’s husband is named Fred, likely this poem is at least partially to, about, and/or for him. This impression is supported by the very realistic scene of two married adults working in different parts of their house during a storm. As with the boys in the second stanza, the speaker does not mention any specific memories of the addressee of this poem. However, the reasons for these exclusions feel different; the speaker does not feel she has anything substantial to say about the boys she dated as a youth, while the addressee is so part of her present that any stories exemplifying their love would feel redundant.
By describing an imaginary scene where the addressee is a brave knight, however, the speaker does enough to make the reader understand her love. Whether the addressee could ever actually be brave or noble enough to be a knight in shining armor is beside the point; the speaker can imagine it, and that tells the reader enough to understand the speaker's feeling of warmth and safety.
Floyd
Floyd is not actually a person but a hurricane. The speaker personifies the hurricane, and interestingly, that character is the only one in this poem who does something concrete in the present moment of this poem; the speaker describes him as "cussing up a storm." Dove may have made these choices in order to emphasize how the speaker and the addressee "fall short of the Divine," since they exist in this stormy, uncontrollable world; the safety that the speaker feels inside the house and inside her relationship is brought into greater relief when contrasted with the storm.
Marcel, Percy, Dewey
Marcel, Percy, and Dewey are examples of boys the speaker dated in her adolescence; she does not clarify whether these three names actually refer to specific boys she dated or if these are just the kinds of names she remembered. That lack of specificity reflects how distant those times feel to the speaker. She also refers to the names as "sissy," hinting at a weakness or thinness of those boys' characters compared to that of her current partner.
