Definition

What is a wife?
Is it she who stays in a man's house for all her life? —
If wife were nothing more than that
Then she were equalled by a homing cat.

What is a wife? Shall it be said
She who by contract shares a bed? —
Go find a thousand wives complete
In girls that flaunt along the street!

Nor is it she, content with sequence from a cause,
Who, like a field increase by just laws,
And from a habit and with no end clear,
Brings forth a child for every wedded year.

Wives are the dreaming mothers come again
Who of blest fertile love bear souls of men!
Sometimes, with kindly silence, sometimes with stinging speech
Put a man's high attainment well within his reach.

There is a Virgin-Mother, shrined in Christianity,
There is a virgin wife in faiths to be,
For the constructive form-inducing principle for life,
Is she unknown, unnamed God's wife,
Who out of crystal-bearing water drew the higher ape: —
She might give even Socialism shape!
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