Marriage by Gregory Corso

First published: 1960, in The Happy Birthday of Death

Type of poem: Meditation

The Poem

“Marriage” is a lengthy comic meditation in free verse on the topic announced by the poem’s title. More specifically, the opening line poses two questions: “Should I get married? Should I be good?” The male speaker considers these questions, though he has no intended companion in mind. Rather, the meditation considers the various social archetypes of married life and whether they suit the speaker, who seems to see himself as a subversive of sorts. The poem is divided into seven verse paragraphs of varying length, and it is organized by a variety of scenarios the speaker imagines.

The longest of these scenarios imagines a conventional marriage to “the girl next door.” This fantasy envisions a courtship that mixes the odd (“Don’t take her to movies but to cemeteries”) with the romantically orthodox (“she going just so far and I understanding why”). A familiarly comic scene of meeting the fiancée’s parents follows, as does a description of the wedding and the honeymoon. At the imagined Niagara Falls honeymoon, the speaker is so horrified by the corny lasciviousness of the honeymoon ritual that he chooses not to consummate the marriage. He will, he imagines, stay up all night staring at the hotel clerk and “Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon!” Eventually, he will abandon his marriage and live beneath Niagara Falls itself as “a saint of divorce,” a crazed spirit bent on disrupting the marriage consummations in the thousands of “almost climactic suites.”

All the scenarios similarly end in rejections of marriage. He next imagines a more blissful domestic scene with his wife “aproned young and lovely and wanting my baby.” Here, his subversive tendencies play out as practical jokes aimed at suburban orthodoxy: He will cover the neighbor’s golf clubs with old Norwegian books; he will speak insanely to local canvassers for charities; he will order “penguin dust” from the milkman. This fantasy gives way to a more serious scenario in which, motivated by love for his wife, he strives to be the ideal cultivated father, giving the child a rattle made from “broken Bach records” and sewing “the Greek alphabet on its bib.”

Reality intrudes, however, and the speaker imagines that he is more likely to live in a rat-and roach-infested walk-up apartment in New York City than in such a blissful Connecticut farmhouse. There his wife will be yelling at him to get a job while his “five nose running brats in love with Batman” charge about the overcrowded apartment. As that fantasy ends in a rejection of marriage, he imagines one more scenario: a sophisticated Manhattan penthouse with an elegant wife in evening dress sipping a cocktail. Even that idyll is rejected: “No, can’t imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream.”

Having concluded that marriage is impossible for him, the speaker muses briefly about love, but dismisses it as being “as odd as wearing shoes.” Finally, he sees a fearful vision of himself alone and unmarried: “all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear/ and everybody else is married!” The knowledge that loneliness may well await those who reject the conventions of matrimony influences the melancholy tone of the concluding lines. He imagines that just as his own sensibility exists, so must it be possible for a woman whom he could marry to exist. She could exist anywhere, however—even in ancient Egypt—and both the speaker and the idealized lover wait alone.

Forms and Devices

Tone is a central issue in interpreting this monologue. By invoking and exaggerating orthodox images of matrimony, Gregory Corso comically burlesques the social order. The use of hyperbole and stereotypical images interspersed with absurdist proclamations (“yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel!”) creates a humorous incongruity. Indeed, ironic or surprising juxtaposition accounts for much of the poem’s originality and comedy. The image of hanging a picture of Arthur Rimbaud on the lawn mower juxtaposes the romantic decadence of the youthful French poet with the most conventional tool of suburban lawn maintenance. Such an incongruity, Corso implies, parallels the incongruity of the speaker’s free spirit entering into orthodox matrimony. That Rimbaud abandoned his poetic vocation at a very young age and became a conventional businessman heightens the irony of the juxtaposition.

The poem progresses through a series of such tensions in which idyllic visions of marriage are quickly countered by nightmarish ones. Similarly, the conventional is repeatedly subverted by the unorthodox. The alternations of this poetic dialectic are reflected in the use of “but” and “yet” to mark the shifts in thought that lead to the rejection of traditional marriage and “goodness” in response to the questions of the opening line. The comic exaggeration and manic intensity of the frequent exclamations—the poem has thirty-five exclamation points—is balanced by certain seriousness. That human companionship must take the form of a surrender to social orthodoxy is a serious problem that Corso wishes to expose.

Both Corso’s theme and technique are typical of the Beat movement in literature with which he is associated. The combination of deliberate anticonventionality with language charged with intensity and free association characterizes the work of Corso’s contemporaries—Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. Like these writers, Corso reached his maturity in the highly conventional decade of the 1950’s and reacted vehemently against the American Dream. The reader sees some of the stylistic consequences of this reaction in the speaker’s penchant for disruptive absurdism. Saying “Pie Glue” instead of “I do” at the wedding ceremony, thinking “Flash Gordon soap” in the midst of his interview with his lover’s parents, trying to dream of “Telephone snow”—all these forms of linguistic disruption of the expected reflect the Beat desire to shock the reader out of complacency.

The use of free verse and prosaic syntax (even while the content reaches for the bizarre) is also characteristic of Beat poetry. Similarly, the heavy use of allusion and proper nouns works to put the stuff of contemporary culture into the poem. This culture is itself a hodgepodge of old and new: Thus Ingrid Bergman can appear beside Tacitus, Blue Cross beside Bach, the Knights of Columbus beside the Parthenon. Weaving the items of a cultural mishmash into an extended diatribe, Corso taps the energy of his position as a self-appointed subversive in a highly conventional society.