Holly Patton
Mrs. Jernigan
AP English IV
7 February 2011
“The Bachelor’s Soliloquy”
Edgar Albert Guest
In this satirical piece, Guest poetically incorporates the woes and follies of a bachelor, spinning it off of Shakespeare’s famed Hamlet speech. Guest confronts many conflicting aspects of marriage as he argues, “To wed; to smoke/ No more;…’Tis a consummation/ Devoutly to be wished…To wed; perchance to fight; ay, there’s the rub.” He voices the overarching concerns of many men about to enter into the covenant of marriage. While he wavers at first, finding marriage appealing, he soon views it as a slow usurpation of a man’s power when they “have honeymooning ceased.”
Guest highlights his perspective of marriage with the stereotypical activities of housewives: shopping, singing, meeting with neighbors, mothers-in-law. It seems that he may have been married to one such character or else had seen his friends befall the same, as he would deem it, fate. He emphasizes a man’s want for comfort and simplicity, the want to “Stay home at nights/ In smoking coat and slippers and slink to bed/ At ten o’clock to save the light bills.” His words also express his opinion that he finds the activities of many women to be overall frivolous and the mindset of men to be indisputably practical. An audience of men that would read this would probably run the other direction when faced with a commitment. Guest portrays marriage as a tedious job or a duty instead of the adventure that it is intended to be. He seems to want to enter into a marriage that never for a second loses its luster–I cannot speak from experience, but it seems that marriage’s luster comes and goes in waves. However, if someone holds Guest’s perspective that marriage merely means a “pale cast of chores,” they should probably hold off on a ceremony for a while,
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