My wife with hair of burning splinters
With thoughts of summer lightning
With hour-glass waist
My wife with the waist of an otter between the tiger's teeth
My wife with mouth a cockade and cluster of stars of greatest splendor
With teeth the prints of a white mouse on white earth
And a tongue of stroked amber and glass
My wife her tongue a pierced wafer
The tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
A tongue of incredible stone
My wife with eyelashes marks of a child's pen
Eyelashes rims of a swallow's nest
My wife with brows of slate on a greenhouse roof
And steam on the panes
My wife with shoulders of champagne
And a dolphin-head fountain under the ice
My wife with her matchstick wrists
My wife with fingers of chance and the ace of hearts
Fingers of mown hay

Basic Set-Up:

This is the beginning of Breton's poem "Free Union."

Hey, our life partners are important people, right? We hang out with them, we eat with them, we raise kids with them, and we sleep with them. Hopefully, we also love them… and of course sometimes we hate them. Clearly, the speaker's wife is important to the speaker of this poem. He's writing a whole poem about her, after all.

But, uh, would she have liked this poem? Isn't he, um, saying she has a dolphin's head? We can hear him saying, in his sexytimes voice "Oooh, yeah gurl. You got those fingers of mown hay."

The speaker's feelings about his wife are pretty ambivalent, and we can see that in the imagery. There's soft imagery (her brows are like "rims of a swallow's nest"), and there's hard imagery (she has "thoughts of summer lightning" and a tongue that's like "stone").

The speaker clearly likes his wife, but some of the imagery also suggests that he feels ambivalently about her. She's doesn't just make him feel all warm and fuzzy inside. After all, she makes up a good part of his entire world, so she should evoke images of, yup, pretty much the entire world.

This poem is a great demonstration of the way that the Surrealists use juxtaposition. There are loads of interesting (confusing?) juxtapositions here. The wife's wrists are compared to matchsticks, her fingers to "mown hay," her waist to "an hour-glass," her hair to "burning splinters."

In other words, the poem juxtaposes a woman's body parts with all sorts of strange things. Who would have thought of describing shoulders in terms of "champagne"? Or a tongue in terms of "rubbed amber and glass"? Breton presents readers with some striking juxtapositions in this poem.

So what are we supposed to think? Shucks, our usually cynical Shmoopmind is feeling the lurve here: the speaker is writing that his wife is, in essence, the whole weird wide world. Standard platitudes like "eyes like diamonds" ain't going to cut it. She means more than that.