Rolfe Humphries gives us a divorce in which nobody is suing anybody. The title promises a legal drama or a broken household, but the opening lines turn out to be about creation itself. Light, which the poem calls "of two elements the unison, / Of air and fire," performs "the office of division," separating earth from water so that hill and valley, ocean and river can each exist as themselves. The divorce, in other words, is the moment the world acquires its shape, and the poem asks us to celebrate it, even to treat it like a wedding in reverse.
That inversion is the poem's central joke and its central idea. The fourth stanza calls this separation "the single happiness in which they move," and the fifth asks "friends and witnesses" to "rejoice, approve" and give "your fondest blessing, and your love." This is the language of marriage ceremonies, redirected toward a parting. The argument underneath is that distinctness is a gift: things are more themselves, and more valuable, when kept apart. Texture and color, "boundary and line," "motion and rest" all depend on difference, and the poem claims everything is "more intense, all given brighter worth" for it. Then the ending complicates the celebration. "What one made two, nothing will render one," the poem declares, and in the very next breath darkness arrives to do exactly what was just ruled impossible.
The construction carries this shift. The opening is built from tercets, but the first stanza rhymes in an unusual way: "unison," "one," "division." The word "one" appears three times in two lines, and the rhyme of "one" with "unison" and "division" makes unity and splitting sound like the same event. After that the poem settles into triplets that rhyme all three lines (sunder/sever/forever/river, sign/line/shine, mirth/worth/earth), and the effect is deliberately tidy. Three matching sounds in a row feel like a verdict being handed down with satisfaction. The long lines, many of them close to iambic pentameter, give the middle stanzas a stately, ceremonial pace, as if they were being read aloud at the event they describe.
Pay attention to the lists, too. "Hill, valley, mountain; ocean, lake, and river" splits the landscape into two sets with a semicolon, so the punctuation itself performs the divorce. "The melody, magnificence and mirth" piles up m-sounds, a small burst of the abundance that separation supposedly produces. The poem's vocabulary is full of words that cut: "division," "sunder," "sever," "boundary," "line." Light is imagined as an active agent, almost an official, one who "enacts" and "performs the office." There is something faintly bureaucratic and faintly regal in that diction, which keeps the cosmic subject from getting sentimental.
Then the final two stanzas break the pattern. The rhyme scheme loosens: "sun" and "one" still chime, but "negation" hangs at the end of its line without a partner, an unrhymed gap that mimics the annulment it names. Darkness, "my lord the sun's" rival, becomes "the sable reconciler," a title that sounds courteous and ominous at once. It "remembers / The vain petitions of unending numbers" and "brings them together in his solemn chambers." The word "chambers" quietly suggests both a bedroom and a burial vault, and "sable" is the color of mourning. Reunion, the poem implies, is real but arrives only in night, and perhaps in death. The word "vain" tells us how much longing, how many "unending numbers" of petitions for togetherness, darkness has already collected.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so small a space. In twenty-one lines it manages a creation story, a wedding parody, an argument about identity, and a quiet elegy for everything that wants to be joined and cannot be, at least while the sun is up. It does not tell us whether to prefer day's separateness or night's merging. It lets both stand, and the wry, formal tone makes the ending land harder, because the poem has spent so long sounding sure that division is something to applaud.