Where is the Romance?
John Brehm’s ‘Of Love and Life Insurance: An Argument’
The poem is a free verse paragraph, which sections itself into six parts.
Part 1: “'I need to accept you as you are,' she said”
The girlfriend says she needs to accept the speaker as he is, which indicates that she does not want to change him, but then she adds, ”so you need to become the kind / of person I can accept.”
The speaker comments cleverly on the idea of becoming: “I was / becoming bewildered, but I don’t / think that’s what she meant.”
While she “needs” to accept him as he is, she finds she cannot do so, because of “[l]ife insurance,”—or the fact that he has does not have any.
Part 2: “But we’ve only known each other / three months”
The poet/speaker then replies that they have known each other for only three months and poses the question, “Aren’t we jumping ahead?” Then the girlfriend gets specific: she imagines them married with a child, and she is so dissatisfied with the marriage that she has to “take [their] child and move / back to Chicago and live with [her] mother.”
Furthermore, she does not want to have take her child to a “public clinic, “ nor does she want to have to “nag [him] and ask [him] / a hundred times about all this stuff.” She is looking out for herself, telling him what she does not want for herself and her child. She is being very pragmatic—premature but practical.
Part 3: “And then my heart fell from the sky”
The poet/speaker then reports, “And then my heart fell from the sky / like a shot bird.” She has wounded him deeply, and he wonders, “Is that how you / imagine a life with me?” The speaker is shocked that this woman with whom he has had a three-month relationship would project such a bitter future for herself if they married.
Part 4: “I guess being an unsuccessful poet”
At this point, the conversation has ended; only the poet/speaker is musing. He postulates, “I guess being an unsuccessful poet / isn’t as attractive as it used to be.” Again, his retort is somewhat humorous. While the romantic notion of the starving artist is always afloat, and some women and men will always be attracted to that romantic fantasy, other more practical individuals will not be so easily swayed.
Part 5: "But where’s the risky spirit”
The speaker continues to engage his own romantic fantasies about the nature of the starving poet and his world of poetry. He believes it takes a “risky spirit” to “leap” “headlong” “into the vast / unknown of love.” Because in that vastness “anything / and everything might happen.” He wonders where those romantic views have gone.
He wonders what happened to the notion that poems are “sustaining luxuries and dangers.” And where is the desire “to make one’s life itself / a poem”? He is so in love with poetry that he believes it offers “a door into the other world / through which even a child might walk.”
Part 6: “Words have such power, I wanted to tell her”
He wanted to tell her how important poetry is, how important the mystery of the unknown is to him, with the possibility that someone will benefit from poetry’s words. He uses the term “beneficiary” to resonate with the earlier “life insurance” request, but the girlfriend would not be so inclined toward that great unknown, she would still want him to show her the money.
