Maxwell Bodenheim, a sharp-tongued figure of the Chicago literary renaissance and later a notorious Greenwich Village bohemian, wrote “Two Sonnets to My Wife II” in the early twentieth century, when modernists were testing how much psychological candor a traditional form could hold. Bodenheim made his name as a poet of urban grit and ironic detachment, publishing in the same Chicago circles as Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters. His work often bristles against sentimental expectation, and this sonnet—part of a pair addressed to his wife—takes a form long associated with idealized love and turns it into a portrait of a woman whose greatest attraction is her refusal to perform feeling on demand.
The speaker describes a wife who “relents to life”—she does not rush through each moment with a “deft and rapid note.” When expression falters, a “clumsy weirdness” settles in her throat, producing a music that is “weak” and that “bargains with the groping of her heart.” Rather than indulging that faltering sound, she shifts into “graver tones” that refuse to sell themselves “to laughs and moans,” seeking instead “the counsel of a deeper art.” The octave, then, sets up a conflict between cheap emotional display and something harder-won. The sestet visualizes that restraint: she drapes her “loud emotions” in a “shroud / Of glistening thought,” allowing only occasional glimpses of the dancers underneath, their “startled eyes” breaking through. The poem’s central claim arrives bluntly: the “depths of mind” inside her have not bowed to “sleek emotion with its amorous glance.” Instead, she slaps that seductive force and laughs at its surprise. Bodenheim’s speaker does not love his wife despite her composure; he loves the way her intellect disciplines passion into a deeper art.
Formally, the poem is a sonnet with a strange, off-balance pulse. Fourteen lines fall into an octave rhyming ABBA CDDC and a sestet rhyming EFG EFG, so the customary closing couplet never arrives to snap the argument shut. The rhymes themselves are exact—“speak” answering “weak,” “heart” returning as “art”—but the enclosed quatrains keep the ear circling rather than closing. The meter is mostly iambic pentameter, yet phrases like “clumsy weirdness” and “glistening thought” create small rhythmic bulges, as if the language itself is negotiating between smoothness and friction. That negotiation mirrors the wife’s own process: feeling rises, thought covers it, and what emerges is controlled but alive. The imagery works through concealment and transaction—music that bargains, tones that sell themselves, a shroud that waves above a dance. Even the word “shroud” suggests both death and protection: the emotions are not destroyed, but wrapped, hidden, and occasionally allowed to peer through.
What makes the poem significant is its cool revision of the love sonnet. Instead of cataloguing beauty or swearing devotion, Bodenheim praises a marriage built on emotional intelligence and wit. The wife’s final slap is not cruelty; it is a comic, liberating refusal to let love be governed by cliché. In its compressed argument, the sonnet practices the very restraint it admires—thought controlling passion, form holding feeling—while still allowing a startled, laughing energy to break through.