The Circle (motif)
The circle pops up many times in this text, such as the wedding ring ("this fire-gilt steel / alive with goldenness; / how bright it shows - 'of circular traditions and impostures'"), the roundness of the "dazzling" apple, the "cycloid inclusiveness" of married people. Circles have multiple connotations and associations, but here there is the sense that they are enclosing, suffocating. They are rigid and closed with no fungibility or relaxation of boundaries; they are tautological, much as the arguments of Adam and Eve are. As critic Darlene Erickson notes, "Everything in the poem about marriage is thematically circular—except that the circles are not concentric. They may intertwine, intersect, pass in and out of each other, overlap, but they are always cycloids, separate circles seeking unity but finding instead the tension of opposites."
The Poem as an Allegory of Writer and Text (allegory)
Although this poem predates Roland Barthes's The Death of the Author essay by several decades, it is a nonetheless useful work in approaching "Marriage." Barthes argues that the traditional concept of the author as authority, as creator of the text and its meaning, is no longer valid for modern writers. A text is "multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation." The authorial "utterance in its entirety is a void process, which functions perfectly without requiring to be filled by the person of the interlocutors: linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes." Getting rid of the author means that "the claim to 'decipher' a text becomes quite useless. To give an author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing." The person that does become more important, then, is the Reader. Critic Lorrayne Carol sees this in "Marriage," writing "The idea of one generative voice, ordering and arranging, is abandoned. In the face of traditional male authority, Moore pieces together an allegory of the impossibility of identity, of a writing ‘presence’ in the poem. There can be no one authoritative writing subject, just as no ‘one’ is a ‘woman’. Subjectivity, in its sense as a personal, individualized expression of the artist, cannot be rendered..." Moore's selection of quotes from all manner of sources, from in and outside the canon, from Western and Eastern cultures, all collaged and in dialogue with each other, reinforce the lack of authorial "authority" and presence, and instead emphasize the importance of the reader's role in amalgamating, analyzing, and concluding.
Columbus and the Egg (allegory)
In this famous historical episode Columbus, when asked to stand an egg on its head (an impossible feat that he nonetheless boasted he could carry out), cracked it. His doing something that people assume cannot be done, his breaking of something whole to achieve his end, mirrors the essential impossibility of marriage and the fact that it can only truly "succeed" if the partners are willing to sacrifice, willing to break, willing to defy the conventions and expectations of the institution/enterprise. Married people must shatter that "cycloid inclusiveness" (the image of the egg is perfect here) to get to the "essence of the matter," to see that it is rare for them to be anything other than "striking opposites." Only then would they be able to perhaps have a marriage in which "liberty and union" are truly reconciled.
The Nightingale (symbol)
Adam complains about the nightingale's silences and how he does not understand it, which is significant because the nightingale symbolizes Eve—and also the "muse" that inspires the poet. It is a beautiful creature with a splendid voice, but it refuses to sing for Adam (who now sees himself as an "idol"). As a man "alive with words," Adam especially cannot understand Eve's silences. It plagues and unnerves him that he cannot control the bird, and it is this inability to put aside his selfishness and pride that results in his "[stumbling] over marriage." Furthermore, as with many of Moore's images and symbols, there are a multitude of possibilities. Traditionally in literature the nightingale, referred to by Borges as "encrusted with mythology," has stood for love but not just love: love mingled with death, love inflected with melancholy. Petrarch wrote of how it "melodious mourns," Coleridge called it a "melancholy bird," The nightingale sang for Romeo and Juliet and essentially forecast their doom; here the nightingale's mere presence as well as the fact that it cannot even carry out the action most associated with it is an ominous indication that Adam and Eve's marriage will fail.
