Genevieve Taggard published “Married” in the early 1920s, a moment when young American writers were questioning old scripts for romance, domesticity, and female identity. Taggard, who moved through Greenwich Village’s modernist and feminist circles, often wrote about love not as a tidy resolution but as a site of conflict and self-loss. The title of the poem sounds like a status, even an achievement, yet the poem immediately turns that status hollow.
From the first lines, the speaker addresses her partner with intimate possessives — “Lover of my lips. / Holder of my heart” — but the opening image is of a face slipping away. Closeness and separation are superimposed. The phrase “close companionships” is deliberately plural, as if the couple has shared countless ordinary intimacies, yet those intimacies cannot prevent the refrain: “Apart, apart, we are apart.” The repetition sounds less like a statement than a realization the speaker cannot stop making. It cuts the stanza in two, much as the speaker feels cut off from the person beside her.
The poem’s construction mirrors that emotional division. Its short lines and shifting rhymes create a sense of broken song. The first stanza pairs “slips” with “lips” and “heart” with “apart,” so that love’s language is always shadowed by distance. In the second stanza, the partner’s “fire” has become “cold and still,” an internal contradiction that underscores the death at the center of the marriage. The speaker watches morning arrive and knows she “always will” — a future of sleepless repetition. Taggard uses “dull agony” deliberately: the pain is not sharp but chronic, woven into daily hours. The word “dull” returns three times in the final stanza, turning the poem into the chant or moan it describes.
The description “strong, solemn, stupid-kind” captures the partner in a few hard strokes. “Stupid-kind” is especially cutting: it suggests a kindness that is sincere but oblivious, a tenderness that cannot see the damage it accompanies. As the couple parts, their footsteps sound “dead on the hollow ground.” The rhyme of “sound” and “ground” places life’s movement on top of emptiness. Here the poem grows shorter and heavier, its monosyllables landing like footsteps on hollowed earth. The absence of the “apart” refrain in this stanza makes the silence itself feel present.
Against this hollow present, Taggard sets a memory of a “singing river” and a self that could run “wild with wonder.” That earlier self belonged to movement and sunlight. Now “there is no river, there is no sun, / Only an old vow.” The old vow is the marriage promise, preserved but emptied. It remains while the living world disappears. The final lines make the cost physical: “Half of my body must be dead.” Marriage has not joined two wholes; it has left the speaker half-alive. The line is shocking because it turns emotional distance into bodily fragmentation. “We are apart” then becomes not a temporary quarrel but an amputation.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to romanticize marriage. Published at a time when women’s roles were being reexamined, it insists that legal or emotional partnership can be a form of erasure, especially for a woman whose former vitality is remembered as a wild river. The poem is small, but its repetitions and stark imagery give it the force of a spell or a private ritual. Taggard does not reach for comfort; she gives the dull moan of a person living inside an intimacy that has become hollow. That honesty, and the musical discipline with which she shapes it, keeps the poem from self-pity and makes it feel startlingly alive a century later.