To The Man I Married Analysis

Jofie D. Saligan

ANALYSIS

2GMT

To The Man I Married Angela Manalang – Gloria

A. INTRODUCTION The author, Angela Manalang Gloria, was a Filipina poet born on August 23, 1907 in Guagua, Pampanga. At the University of the Philippines where she took up liberal arts, she discovered her passion for poetry and painting on the sides. A fastidious and hardworking student, she graduated summa cum laude with an A.B. in philosophy in March 1929. She first appeared on the literary scene in Manila in 1925 and was immediately hailed with extravagant praise as “the only Filipina poetess worthy of the name.” By the 1930s her reputation had grown such that Jose Garcia Villa felt sufficiently threatened to launch an attack. It was at UP where she became literary editor of the UP Collegian and met her future husband, Celedonio P. Gloria who was then editor in chief of the same school publication. After college, she became editor of the Herald Mid-Week Magazine but had to resign six months later because of poor health. Her poem “To The Man I Married” portrays her love for her husband by comparing her need for him to her need of the earth the earth. B. STRUCTURE ANALYSIS Part I: Part I of Angela Manalang Gloria’s “To the Man I Married” is a combination English/Italian sonnet: it consists of an octave with the rime scheme ABABCDCD and in the sestet EFEFGG. The overall rhyme-scheme is that of the English sonnet, but instead of three quatrains and a couplet, it features the octave and sestet. Octave: In the octave, the speaker makes the bold claim addressing the man she married: “You are my earth and all that earth implies.” The speaker’s claim alerts the reader to a metaphorical comparison: the addressee is her earth. The speaker’s final point of comparison is both startling yet quite logical: her husband is like the earth, in that he is “the final, elemental clay / the driven heart must turn to for its rest.” Sestet: As most octaves in Italian sonnets do, this octave has offered a thought that will receive a twist in the sestet. While the octave implies a very close and sustaining relationship between the speaker and her husband, the sestet asserts that that closeness does not completely satisfy all of the needs of the speaker as an individual: “If in your arms that hold me now so near / I lift my keening thoughts to another one.”

Part II: Part II of “To the Man I Married” consists of two quatrains with the rime scheme ABAB, ACDC, in which the speaker asserts that she does not want to overstate her case about her love for her husband, and she even backtracks somewhat. Although he is metaphorically her earth, she really cannot compare her love for him to the ocean, because “no such love / and no such ocean can ever be.” But she can love him in a finite way, like the waves that keep crashing against the shore; after all, those waves do reflect “The blue of everlasting skies.” Figures of Speech "As finite as the wave that dies”= SIMILE “The land that stills my cries” = PERSONIFICATION

C. IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS *Central Theme – In my own comprehension the persona portrays the man that she married as someone that is so essential to her very existence. In the poem it all goes around to the fact that his husband is the one that completes her and someone that she can’t lose. But even though at the second stanza she stated that her love cannot out compare the boundless sea but doesn’t really depicts that her love for him is lesser but because only the creator our God is the one who can love beyond measure. *Conflict- man vs man = because of her limits being just a human she can’t love her husband infinitely that encompasses the boundaries of the ocean like a divine being like God. D. CONCLUSION Psychoanalytic Theory - this poem can be best describe in this theory because in this poem it is consist of a lot of symbols that portrays his tremendous love for the man that she married and it is based on her humane responses to the world which she lives in which we can clearly see in the poem by how she treated the earth which is something that gives the essential things that she need in order for her to live. Like the psychoanalytic theory, this poem also lets you gaze upon the more underneath meaning of the written texts and is based by egos. SOURCES  http://ithmlit102.blogspot.com/2008/06/to-man-i-married-by-angelamanalang.html  http://english--pt.tumblr.com/post/69689385592/literary-analysis  https://imbelle18.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/literary-analysis/  http://khadijahmitmug21.blogspot.com/

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