Bitter Woman

The Edge

Time and again, time and again I tie
My heart to that headboard
While my quilted cries
Harden against his hand. He's bored --
I see it. Don't I lick his bribes, set his bouquets
In water? Over Mother's lace I watch him drive into the gored
Roasts, deal slivers in his mercy. . . I can feel his thighs
Against me for the children's sakes. Reward?
Mornings, crippled with this house,
I see him toast his toast and test
His coffee, hedgingly. The waste's my breakfast.


This poem is the written equivalent of condensed and packaged bitterness. It shows a marriage between two people, a woman and a man, in which the man has all of the power and the woman feels trapped and abused. Like many of Glück's poems, this piece shows the bitterness and desolation of life as a woman and wife in a patriarchal society and marriage.

Glück's imagery is very precise and calculated, showing very specific thoughts and actions in order to convey the speaker's feeling of frustration and resentment. She says that she "tie[s] / [her] heart to that headboard" while the two have sex (1-2). This implies that she must separate herself from the situation, meaning that the relations are unwanted on her part. The image, however, shows quite literally that her heart is not in her marriage, and she feels that she must set her feelings aside to fulfill the duties that society and her husband impose on her. The images of sex, particularly of unwanted or violent sex, continue throughout the poem. "Don't I lick his bribes," "I watch him drive into the gored / Roasts," and "I can feel his thighs / Against me for the children's sakes" all are sexual images (5,6-7,7-8). The first is submissive, the second is violent, and the third quite clearly says that either one or both of the couple do not feel compelled by love or desire. They all show that the feelings of entrapment and the frustration at the relationship carry over from the bedroom into the everyday things that the speaker does or watches her husband do.

The tone of this poem is purely bitter. The speaker is angry, and there is a feeling that the anger has been building for quite a while. Her use of rhetorical questions and of several short phrases show her outbursts of frustration and her bitterness. She asks, "Don't I lick his bribes, set his bouquets / In water?" (5-6). She later asks, "Reward?" (8). These two questions convey how wits-end frustrated the speaker is. Short statements such as "He's bored" and "The waste's my breakfast" show the situation itself and the bitterness of the speaker (4, 11). She is so angry that she cannot use long, descriptive sentences. She has to express herself only with short statements filled with feeling and vitriol.

This poem shows the anger and emptiness that fills the life of a housewife. Glück was married in the 60s and 70s before getting a divorce, and you can see the influence of the times on her life and work. She was married with children and no job to occupy her, and, coupled with depression that is clear in her work and several disorders that were addressed in her childhood, she probably had a very hard time feeling content with the nothingness of housewifery, especially since her marriage never seems to have worked. This is all expressed in the poem, which shows the bitterness that she feels and the resentment, both at her husband and at her life.