The Theme of the Three Caskets

The Theme of the Three CasketsAuthor(s): William MatthewsSource: The Iowa Review, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Winter, 1985), pp. 28-30Published by: University of IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20156120 .

Accessed: 17/06/2014 20:33

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Iowa Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.81 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 20:33:56 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uiowa

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20156120?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


The Theme of the Three Caskets

William Matthews

Men and women are two locked caskets,

each of which contains the key to the other. Isak Dinesen

One gold, one silver, one lead: who thinks

this test easy has already flunked.

Or, you have three daughters, two humming birds and the youngest, Cordelia, a grackle.

And here's Cinderella, the ash-princess. Three guesses, three wishes, three strikes and

you're out. You've been practicing for this

for years, jumping rope, counting out,

learning to waltz, games and puzzles, tests and chores. And work, in which strain

and ease fill and drain the body like air

having its way with the lungs. And now?

Your palms are mossy with sweat.

The more you think the less you understand.

It's your only life you must choose, daily.

* * *

28



Freud, father of psychoanalysis, the study of self-deception and survival,

saw the wish-fulfillment in this theme:

that we can choose death and make what we can't

refuse a trophy to self-knowledge, grey,

malleable, dense with low tensile strength

and poisonous in every compound. And that a vote for death elects love.

If death is the mother of love (Freud wrote

more, and more lovingly, on mothers

than on fathers), she is also the mother

of envy and gossip and spite, and she

loves her children equally. It isn't mom

who folds us finally in her arms,

and it is we who are elected.

* * *

Is love the reward, or the test itself?

That kind of thought speeds our swift lives

along. The August air is stale in

the slack leaves, and a new moon thin

as a fingernail paring tilts orange

and low in the rusty sky, and the city is thick with trysts and spats,

and the banked blue fires of TV sets, and the anger and depression that bead

29



on the body like an acid dew when it's hot.

Tonight it seems that love is what's

missing, the better half. But think

with your body: not to be dead is to be

sexual, vivid, tender and harsh, a riot

of mixed feelings, and able to choose.

30



The Theme of the Three Caskets

Documents

Transcript of The Theme of the Three Caskets