Marriage, in William Dickey's "A Little Night Music," looks at first like a picture of cosy domestic peace: a fire, an evening, a couple settled in for the night. Then the poem lets us listen in on what the couple actually says to each other, and the cosiness curdles into something far more sinister. Husband and wife trade cruelties like other couples trade pleasantries, and they do it contentedly, even affectionately. The poem's central idea is that hostility can become a form of intimacy, a ritual so established that it feels like comfort. The title's "little night music" is borrowed from the idea of a gentle evening serenade, and the joke is that this serenade is a duet of spite.
The governing image is the cat, and Dickey uses it in two directions at once. The couple "purr" and call themselves "the indigenous felines, / Whiskered and pompous and grey." The comparison is double-edged: it suggests the smugness of pets curled by a hearth, but also the sleek cruelty of animals who play with what they catch. Their day is "malicious," yet what they "lap up" is "placid content," and the collision of those two words sums up the poem. The malice and the contentment are the same thing. Meanwhile there is a real cat in the room, "the only spectator / To the enmity we knit." The verb "knit" is a lovely domestic choice, making hatred sound like a cardigan being slowly, patiently worked on by the fire.
The middle stanzas are built as exchanges, each speaker's barb matched by the other's. He boasts that he ate the dinner meat and left the cat "the bones"; she has pawned his furs for "trifling loans." He leaves the cat's worms for her to deal with; she announces that his bridge partners are dying and "the doctors have given up hope." The cruelties escalate from petty theft to illness and death, yet the tone never rises. Nobody shouts. The quotation marks give us no dialogue tags and no reaction, so the insults land like moves in a game both players know by heart. Notice, too, that the real cat is dragged into the quarrel as a casualty, getting the bones and the worms. The "sweet cat" is the one creature in the house treated as an object to be neglected.
Formally, the poem is almost aggressively tidy. It is written in quatrains with an alternating rhyme scheme, the second and fourth lines rhyming ("lit" / "knit," "grey" / "day," "bones" / "loans," "cope" / "hope"). The rhythm is light and bouncy, closer to a nursery rhyme or a music-hall song than to a tragedy. That jauntiness is the point. The smoothness of the verse imitates the smoothness of the couple's routine, and it makes the content more chilling, since the poem seems as comfortable with cruelty as the pair are. Some of the rhymes are cleverly comic: "hope" for the dying friends falls with the same cheerful thud as "cope" for the cat's worms, flattening a death sentence into a household chore.
The ending turns the poem's logic upside down. As the fire dims, the couple "pat each other's cheeks," the affectionate gesture that closes their ugly performance, then go through their small bedtime tasks: she puts out "the tall milk bottles," he takes off "my boots and breeks." The ordinariness is almost tender. Only the cat is left unsettled. "Discontented / With himself, with me, with her," he spends the night "trying to learn to purr." This is the poem's sharpest stroke. The animal is the outsider who can sense that the couple's purring is the real thing, the language of belonging, and he cannot manage it. He is the one who wants love and cannot find the trick of it, while the humans, who have supposedly mastered it, have turned it into a weapon.
What makes the poem memorable is that it refuses to choose between comedy and horror. It is funny, and the humour is what lets the unease in. By ending with the cat's failed purring, Dickey hints that real warmth is something you can't imitate, and that a marriage built on mutual injury may be a strange kind of fit, but is hardly a happy one. The final image lingers: a small animal awake in the dark, practising a sound that the two people beside him make so easily and so falsely.