Most poems about a quarrel give us the fight. "The Quarrel" gives us the aftermath of one, or rather the strange, anticlimactic space around it. The argument itself never appears. We get only its residue: "the little hates between them had begun," a woman running up a pasture slope, a man who lets her go. By the end, the whole crisis has deflated into a plate of breakfast, and the poem's quiet power lies in how much it says by refusing to dramatize.
The central idea seems to be that domestic anger, however sharp in the moment, is absorbed by the routines of ordinary life. The man's mind "was on his chores and on her wrath," and the order of that line matters: chores come first. His emotional crisis and his daily work sit in the same breath, as if they were equal items on a list. When he returns from the milking, she is "fixing breakfast unconcerned," and we are left wondering who has won, or whether the quarrel mattered at all. The word "unconcerned" is wonderfully slippery. Is she genuinely over it, or performing indifference? The poem judges neither of them.
The first quatrain is built on small ironies. "He let her run" suggests a man who believes he is in control, yet the sentence also shows his helplessness: letting someone run is a way of not following. She takes "some rope / To scare him if she could, which she could not." That line is almost comic. The rope is a threat she cannot carry out, and the plain, flat phrase "which she could not" punctures any melodrama. Nobody here is truly dangerous. Their anger is real but domestic in scale, and the poem's tone, dry and faintly amused, keeps reminding us of that. Even the moon "mark[s] an imprudent path," a lovely touch in which the landscape seems to comment, a little primly, on her choices.
The sound of the poem does much of the emotional work. The meter is a steady iambic pentameter, and the rhyme scheme (ABABCDCD, then EFEF, then a closing couplet) gives the poem the shape of a sonnet, though a slightly loosened one. That form is telling. A sonnet traditionally builds toward a turn, and here the turn arrives with "And off he went for chores." The final couplet, "returned" and "unconcerned," lands with a small click, like a door closing on the whole episode. The tidiness of the rhyme mirrors the tidiness with which the household resets itself.
The middle section turns from the couple to the landscape, and this is where the imagery grows richest. The milk-train's whistle "hooted like a horn / Soured by time," a simile that smells as well as sounds, since "soured" belongs to milk and the poem is about a dairy farm. The freight train is "asthmatic," heaving "its asthmatic thunder through the corn," so that machinery wheezes like a tired body. These sounds are worn, slightly sour, a little exhausted, and they quietly echo the mood between the two people. The "wet wind" of the first stanza and the "wet mist" of the second wrap the scene in dampness, a heavy, unclear atmosphere that suits an argument no one has resolved.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It trusts small details, a rope, a whistle, cows lowing at a gate, to carry a whole marriage's emotional weather. It also resists the easy moral that anger fades and love wins. The ending is ambiguous, and arguably more truthful for it: life on a farm does not pause for feelings, and the poem suggests that ordinary tasks can bury a quarrel without ever settling it. A reader finishes the poem unsure whether the couple have made peace or simply agreed not to speak of it, which is, after all, how many real quarrels end.