The speaker watches their elderly parents lying in separate beds, distant and passionless after a long marriage yet still bound together, and wonders whether they know they are old.
How Jennings's similes of flotsam, a confession and a thread, and the paradox of being apart yet close, show a marriage that has lost its passion but kept its bond.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Lying apart now, each in a separate bed', 'She like a girl dreaming of childhood', 'Tossed up like flotsam from a former passion', 'They hardly ever touch', 'like a confession / Of having little feeling – or too much', 'Chastity faces them', 'Strangely apart, yet strangely close together', 'Silence between them like a thread to hold', 'time itself's a feather', 'Whose fire from which I came, has now grown cold?'.
Form: three six-line stanzas with regular rhyme ending in couplets, an observer revealed only near the end as the couple's child, and a closing question.
Context: Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001), a Catholic poet whose plain metre and rhyme link her to the Movement poets of the 1950s, though she said her poems were not directly autobiographical; and the title's echo of the Bible's account of marriage, in which husband and wife 'shall be one flesh'.
Compares well with: Neutral Tones (love grown cold), A Child to his Sick Grandfather (old age seen by a younger relative), My Father Would Not Show Us (a child watching a parent) and A Complaint (silence where love was).
