ating their marriage and their love for one another in a series of sharp images. The poem does not have a regular meter or a rhyme scheme and instead relies on the juxtaposition of images and the use of internal rhyme, alliteration, and other sound devices.
"The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter"
This poem is supposed to be in the form of a letter from wife to husband, and the story of their life together is found in the words of the letter. It is apparent that the way the wife observes the man she married has changed since she was forced by social custom to marry him when she was fourteen, and the letter expresses how her fears and unhappiness withered away over time until now there is real affection between them. Each stanza begins with a statement of the age of the wife when she had the thoughts and attitudes next expressed, and the last stanza is clearly contemporary as she describes how her husband left and how she is waiting for him to return. When the two are first married, the girl is frightened and stand-offish, too shy to express how she feels and resigned to her fate in some fashion:
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back Lines 9-10).
She has changed from her early fears to a woman anxiously waiting for her husband to return:
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
And I will come out to meet you (lines 26-28).
The poem has a loving tone that is created slowly, from the early stanzas about the arranged marriage to the last where the wife waits for the husband to return.
The title points to the ideal of the perfect woman, an ideal held by many men and fostered by the Barbie Doll, which many believe inculcates young girls into believing that they have to be picture-perfect as well. The poet uses the doll here to create a tone of sarcasm and irony. A specific child is referred to, a child taught to be perfect, and then she ...