Couplings Poem Analysis

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Couplings – Menna Elfyn Couplings by Menna Elfyn is a poem about love, life and relationships: mainly about a couple starting their life together, written in the form of couplets. The poem uses provocative vocabulary, meant to jar you out of a peaceful mindset – ‘ruins’, ‘knock’, ‘skyless’… It perpetuates the idea that the house, which is a metaphor for the couple, isn’t perfect – it’s ‘crooked’, ‘creaking’. The fact that the lines don’t rhyme but they still get the message across could be to imply that the couple is imperfect but they still work well together. In the first line, Elfyn states that the life is like a house that is broken and that the couple which she writes about plans to fix it. She uses assonance to create a rhythm in ‘house’ and ‘up’, as well as in ‘is’, ‘in’, ‘ruins’, ‘fix’ and ‘it’, keeping to a similar sound range. Ending the poem with enjambment on the word ‘up’ could suggest that the poem is uplifting and has a positive beginning. In the following line, the vocabulary sounds more comforting, with consonance of the ‘n’ sound in words ‘and’, ‘snug’, ‘hands’, ‘knock’ and ‘into’. There is also assonance with the ‘a’ – ‘and’, ‘make’, ‘hands’, ‘shape’ – and ‘u’ sound that continues from the previous line in ‘snug’. With the third line, she starts a new stanza in the middle of a sentence, which could signify the fact that the fixing of the house is dragging on. Her use of ‘Till’ in the middle of the sentence gives the reader a feeling of expectation, as if
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