I read the assigned poem "Free Union" by Andre Breton, and found it interesting, and I must admit slightly disturbing. Throughout the entire poem, Breton is describing his wife using all different sorts of metaphors to compare physical aspects of her body to inanimate objects. He begins at the top of her body with her hair and teeth, and moves on down to her "rump," and then finally finishes by describing her eyes. By using metaphors instead of similes, he is saying that his wife is this perfect image, rather than that she is comparable all of these nice ideas. This makes his voice and description much more straightforward and sincere. My first time through reading the poem, I began to picture a very beautiful, delicate and graceful woman. He achieved this immediate effect because of those metaphors.
However, on a more personal level, the second time I read through the poem I began to find it a little creepy. Breton really focuses in on his wife's specific physical aspects, and not on the happy quirks in her personality, or the way she makes him feel. He sees every aspect of her body as impeccable, and wants his readers to be as drawn into that as he is.
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I've been writing a literary analysis on this piece and after learning more about it and speaking with professors from major universities, I have more clarity of this piece. The reason why the focus is on the physical aspects is because he was not actually writing about his wife. It was in fact his mistress. For the most part, relationships with a mistress are purely physical. The way he describes her shows how much he truly loves her. Each linecan be read with depth and beauty. I hope this piece gave you feelings of positive emotions rather than negative ones.
"Woman is the being who projects the greatest shadow or the greatest light into our dreams" wrote Baudelaire...Some metaphors of "Free union" ("My wife with shoulders of champagne", "my wife with fingers of chance and ace of hearts", "my wife with buttocks of spring", "my wife with eyes of wood always under the axe") are absolutely dazzling and if Breton only speaks about the woman's body, it is because he looks upon it as the mirror of the whole universe. There is no true love without burning eroticism and eroticism is almost always present in great poetry, in an implicit or explicit way.
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