Two as One Essay #4

Ashley Booth
Instructor Holder
English 102
August 4, 2007
Two as One

“Conjoined” by Judith Minty is truly a poem about marriage. While the author doesn’t speak specifically about the marriage of a man and a woman or of body and soul, she does use several metaphors with which she compares marriage. A two-headed calf, conjoined twins, and a deformed onion all compare to a certain aspect of marriage, especially that of man and wife.

In the first stanza, Judith Minty speaks about an onion. More specifically, it is two onions molded together under a single thin layer of onion skin. The onion is made of two, “each half-round, then flat and deformed/ where it pressed and grew against each other” (line 3-4). Once married (or joined), the two onions grew into and away from each other simultaneously. If separated, they would have grown normally, but connected, they developed into round onions except where they merge into one. At their intersection, they are misshapen and flat. In some ways, marriage between two people is like this. Each person continues to grow spiritually, emotionally, physically and intellectually throughout their life, but in a marriage, being so close to another person that you grow to be more like them and less like yourself.

The second comparison is about a two-headed calf that is trying to get milk from its mother’s udder. This metaphor functions better concerning the marriage of body and soul than that of man and wife. While cows typically have four teats, a calf with two heads has a difficult time finding an angle at which both mouths can suckle. Even though there is one stomach, both brains register the need for nourishment and try to satisfy it. Often there are struggles between body and soul that work out in this way. There is refreshment to be had, but the mix of carnal and spiritual is often to awkward to reach the table. Sometimes when searching for rest and salvation for the soul, the body wins out and pulls the entire person in a different direction. This battle of desires and will to win is what Judith Minty is talking about in “Conjoined”. In the fight for each calf’s head to suckle at a teat, neither ends up getting as much as they need. It is often the same in the marriage of body and soul, because while each is warring with the other, neither gets to enjoy what they have or reach for what they want.

Chang and Eng, the two famous Siamese twins from the 1800’s, are the third comparison. Joined by their body trunks throughout their life, they nevertheless married and fathered a total of 22 children. This conjoining of two lives is possibly the most obvious of the three metaphors used in Judith Minty’s poem. The metaphor’s significance deals with the conjoining of two lives in a marriage. In a marriage, two people “live, even make love together” (line 8), just as the original Siamese twins did. The man and wife are, as the twins, connected in a way. The husband and wife are connected throughout their lives. Every action one makes affects the other.

In the final stanza of the poem, Judith Minty refers to the woman and her husband, “together as [they] move” (line 11) through their home. If they are separated, they might be free, but they have just as big of a chance of dying from the separation (line 12-13). From the woman’s perspective, it seems that her husband doesn’t know that she feels like they are too closely attached. She says “men/ Don’t slice onions in the kitchen, seldom see/ What is invisible” (lines 14-16). The man she is “joined” with does not seem to notice that they have become deformed and flattened where they have pressed against each other, like the onion.



Works Cited
Minty, Judith. “Conjoined.” Handout.

Conjoined
By Judith Minty
The onion in my cupboard, a monster, actually
two joined under one transparent skin:
each half-round, then flat and deformed
where it pressed and grew against the other.

An accident, like the two-headed calf rooted
in one body, fighting to suck at its mother’s teats:
or like those other freaks, Chang and Eng, twins
joined at the chest by skin and muscle, doomed
to live, even make love, together for sixty years.

Do you feel the skin that binds us
Together as we move, heavy in this house?
To sever the muscle could free one,
But might kill the other. Ah, but men
don’t slice onions in the kitchen, seldom see
what is invisible. We cannot escape each other.



Comment:
This piece was my greatest challenge because finding 750 words worth of explanation about a 75 word poem is quite difficult. I found it really hard to analyze enough about this poem to make the essay long enough. Maybe you all didn't have this problem, but it is really hard for me to write about poetry because it's difficult to form a coherent sentence about what I really think. Most of the time when I analyze poetry, the answers I come up with are a mix of colors and feelings and memories and ideas, not typically a complete thought.