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Carl Haken

A wife's worries about her husband's garden

"In Defense of our Overgrown Garden" by Matthea Harvey shows the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of a young wife whose husband takes care of the garden and likes it a lot, but who has been gone on a trip for a long time. The poem's speaker is the wife, who is now finally getting to talk to her husband before he gets home. She is excited to talk to him again but worried that he will become angry about the disrepair that the garden has fallen into.

At the beginning of the poem, the wife starts to talk about the garden by beginning with an event which she can think of a specific time for, last night. She says "Six hard red apples broke through the greenhouse glass" (line 2) and proceeds to describe the lettuce as looking like they were made of "pastels and light and/Chalk" (lines 4-5), not just "seeds and soil" (line 4). She is describing the garden as a very beautiful thing, even though it is slowly falling to pieces, in an attempt to make her husband not feel as distressed about the garden's disrepair.

The wife then excitedly gets right to her next point, the neighbors, without even breaking her sentence. She tells her husband how "Chalk x's mark our oaks that are supposed to be cut down" (line 5) because the neighbors don't like them, and how the neighbors "frown when they look over the fence/and see our espalier pear trees bowing out of shape" (lines 6-7). The wife tries to downplay any concern her husband might have over the neighbors by telling him "I did like that/They looked like candelabras against the wall" (lines 7-8), saying that they look funny when they stare, as its really not something to worry about. She then tells him about one example, where the elderly Mrs Jones was staring at the garden, so the wife told her that she was overreacting and shouldn't care as much. The wife is amazed at what happens next, and says to her husband "I swear/She threw her cane at me and walked off down the street without/It" (lines 9-11). As the wife comes to realize that what she is saying isn't necessarily cheering the husband up, she tries again to downplay the neighbor's thoughts, saying that people who "coo over bonsai trees" (line 12) they are really just fooling themselves, because anything can be beautiful depending on your point of view. What she doesn't directly say is that what she means by that is the garden is still beautiful.

Next, the wife tells her husband about how she tried to fix a problem with the garden. When some birds got stuck in the strawberry nets, she, not fully understanding the purpose of the nets, untangled the birds and let them eat their fill of the berries. She tells bout how "at the window I reread your letter" (line 15) and momentarily gets lost in thought over what he said, but then realized she still has more to say. She apologetically tells him that "The water in the rain barrel has overflowed and made a small swamp/I think the potatoes might turn out slightly damp" (lines 17-18). She is really worried now that her husband will be mad when she gets home, or distressed about the garden, so she reassures him that "If there is no fog on the day you come home I will build a bonfire/So the smoke will make the cedars look the way you like them/To" (lines 19-21). She closes her letter still very worried about how he will react, and says "To close I'm sorry there wont be any salad I love you" (line 21).

The structure of the Poem supports this idea of a wife whose garden-tending husband has been gone, during which time the garden has fallen apart. There are no sentences, no rhyme and no rhythm. Distinct rhyme and rhythm are not parts of ordinary speech, especially among people who know each other intimately. The lack of sentences is created by using the word, or few words, at the end of one sentence as the beginning of the next, for example "crenelated shadows on/**The water** in the rain barrel has overflowed" (lines 16-17), where 'The water' is used in both trains of thought. This suggests the speaker is trying to convey ideas or thoughts very quickly and excitedly, forgetting to use proper sentences in their rush to do so. The run-on of ideas also further supports that the wife is worried that her husband will be mad; every time she finishes telling him something potentially anger causing, she immediately shifts to another topic, to get his mind off the former one, in a sense without even ending her sentence. Not only that, but this type of structure is used more and more frequently the further in the poem you read, which suggests that the wife realizes over time what her words may mean to the husband, and therefore tries to get all her thoughts out faster and faster before he can become angry.

The imagery in this poem is very clear and straightforward, but the poem does not have many in similes and metaphors. Despite the abnormal structure, all the individual images convey an obvious meaning. This further supports the idea of the speaker being a wife finally getting to talk to her husband, because the simile-rich, metaphor-filled language of many poems is not how two intimately related people have a normal discussion. The imagery often takes the form of comparing something mundane to something pretty, such as "those ever-so-slightly green leaves/That seem no mix of seeds and soil but of pastels and light and/Chalk" (lines 3-5), comparing the lettuce to an artist's masterpiece. These comparisons are helping the wife try to reinforce the idea to the husband that his garden is still beautiful, despite it's state of disrepair. They are also very easy to understand, not like many poems which use imagery that takes some thought, because the wife is telling everything to her husband excitedly and hurriedly, and wants him to understand, not ponder.

"In Defense of our Overgrown Garden" shows some of how a person reacts when they both want very much to talk to someone and are worried that what they say will anger that person. In this case, the speaker speeds up their already rapid chains of thought to get everything across before it sinks in and the listener can become angry, and eventually resorts to trying to cheer up the listener with promises.