Skip to main contentAccessibility feedback
Dear catholic.com visitors: This website from Catholic Answers, with all its many resources, is the world’s largest source of explanations for Catholic beliefs and practices. A fully independent, lay-run, 501(c)(3) ministry that receives no funding from the institutional Church, we rely entirely on the generosity of everyday people like you to keep this website going with trustworthy, fresh, and relevant content. If everyone visiting this month gave just $1, catholic.com would be fully funded for an entire year. If you’ve never made a gift, now is the time. Your donation will be matched dollar for dollar this week only. Thanks and God bless.
Dear catholic.com visitors: This Catholic Answers website, with all its free resources, is the world’s largest source of explanations for Catholic beliefs and practices. We receive no funding from the institutional Church and rely entirely on your generosity to sustain this website with trustworthy, accessible content. If every visitor this month donated $1, catholic.com would be fully funded for an entire year. If you’ve never made a gift, now is the time. Your donation will be matched dollar for dollar this week only. Thanks and God bless.

Countless Silken Ties

In his beautiful meditation on marriage (page 12), Jeff Mirus speaks of “the circumscribed space of married love” which “open(s) out to the infinite.” This affecting image immediately put me in mind of
William Wordsworth’s sonnet “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room” which says “In truth the prison, unto which we doom / Ourselves, no prison is.” Wordsworth’s own non-prison in this case is the 14-line sonnet, a highly structured poem whose many rules can seem to stifle. Creativity needs freedom, right? How can the poet realize his full potential if he obeys a bunch of arbitrary rules? But Wordsworth—father of romantic poetry that he is—replies that the restrictions are a “solace” from “the weight of too much liberty.”

Poets write a lot about circumscribed spaces and limitations because they work in such small spaces. They aren’t just talking about poetry, of course, but of the human condition. And for the most part, they celebrate the constraints rather than lament them. Robert Frost’s “The Silken Tent,” for example, is an extended simile about a woman. She is like a tent of silken fabric, which, light and shapeless, could be tossed about in the wind, but is held firm by a a tall cedar pole that supports the middle, pointing heavenward, giving stability and height. The tent is:

. . . loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one’s going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

When I read Dr. Mirus’s description of the fruitfulness of marriage, this image came to mind. A tent, after all, houses and protects, as does a marriage. It is a place for feasting, nurture, sleep. It must be flexible yet firm to withstand the changing winds. It is held up by its firmly pointing heavenward, and as the years go by, it generates “countless silken ties of love and thought.”

Did you like this content? Please help keep us ad-free
Enjoying this content?  Please support our mission!Donatewww.catholic.com/support-us