Alan Dugan's Love Song: I And Thou

Love is not a Fairy Tale

Alan Dugan’s poem entitled “Love Song: I and Thou” is not a stereotypical love poem. On the surface, this appears to be a poem about a man building a house and all the trials that accompany such an undertaking. In actuality, the author is using the building of a home as a metaphor for building a marriage and making a marriage strong. The poem is told from the narrator’s perspective. It begins with the narrator building a house, but nothing was aligned, as it should be. The wood even began to rot and maggots infest his hard work. He claimed that unlike Christ, he is no carpenter, but went on to build his dream home with only his needs in mind. At times, he hammered his own thumb and cursed while he worked; but in the end, he celebrated his own hard work with his favorite whiskey. For a short time, the house was strong and all that it should have been, but then it “screamed,” settled and was anything but what he had
She talks of being away at boarding school, going on various vacations with her friends, and going to different vacation homes rarely used by the families, but adults are never present. When she talks about boys to her mother, there are no words of caution, only little comments hinting to whether her mother approves of the boy or not. The narrator is following in her mother’s promiscuous footsteps. This is evident when she states, “I kept the dial in my top drawer like my mother and thought of her each time I tipped out the yellow tablets in the morning before chapel.” The school doctor offers little other than birth control methods, the headmaster suggest more private places to display affection, and the house-mother agrees that it is a woman’s place to just make babies. The narrator seems to desire guidance from an adult, wishing for a way to bow out of her activities; however enjoys the freedom to explore her sexuality and