What Is a Husband's Biggest Mistake?

Marriage: Intimate and Wide

In the class I quoted earlier, in which I told about my desire to sit on the couch undisturbed, Ellen Reiss asked, "Do you think there's anything in you that would like to rest now that you're married?" "Through love," she said, "we should feel more ambitious to be fair to things."

I am grateful to study what that means together with my wife. And I am tremendously moved by Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman's world meaning as a published author and speaker on the subject of eating disorders and how they can end in a woman's life through the study of Aesthetic Realism, and by seminars she has given here on the questions of women.

In one seminar, Meryl spoke about the life of the Indian princess, Pocahontas. There is a line about this important Native American woman in Carl Sandburg's poem Cool Tombs which beautifully puts together intimacy and width, body and thought, tenderness and strength—and every husband can learn from it. For an Aesthetic Realism Explanation of Poetry class taught by Ellen Reiss, I wrote about this as an instance of a line I liked. Sandburg writes:

Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw
    in November or a pawpaw in May,did she wonder?
    does she remember?...in the dust, in the cool tombs?

Ellen Reiss said the line "does have loveliness and wonder in it." I wrote, in part:

I love the way earth, a woman's body, and her thoughts and feelings mingle in this line. The vowels go out wide, and there is something like softness—paw-paw—and yet they are trees, rooted in the earth. All through the line there is something like earthiness and delicacy.

The phrase that begins the line, "Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar" is simply put, and the feeling is rich. Sandburg compares her body to the poplar tree; it is surprising but it sounds so right. There is something like thrust and yielding in the rhythm of accented and unaccented syllables in the phrase—"Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar"—which is like the way a man can feel about a woman, assertive and affected, impelled and yielding at once.

I am moved too by the way Sandburg asks, "did she wonder? does she remember?" He is affected by Pocahontas' body and also wants to know her thoughts. You feel he wants to be at the center of who she was in her specificity, and at the same time he is at the beginning mystery of who a woman is.

That feeling is what every husband needs to have as he makes the morning coffee and speaks with his wife across the breakfast table. I am a happy, learning husband and I know that in Aesthetic Realism is the explanation of themselves and marriage that men need, want, and deserve!

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