Amour with Scotch,--too cher to consummate;

Faster your disappearing beer than lately mine: Your naked passion for the floor;

Dark as the Sundam Trench.

Their "incredible marriage" dissolves, then begins again as their more credible marriages and responsibilities permit. The antitheses and paradoxes persist and prod the couple until the poet, responding now to his guilt more than his love, seeks new solutions. One answer is simple; their spouses could fall in love with one another: "Why can't. Lise, why shouldn't theyfall in love?" But that never happens.

The secrecy, the frequent long separations, and the impropriety of the affair still rankle, prompting Berryman to hope "Sometime to dine with you. Sometime to go / Sober to bed, a proper citizen." The hope apparently becomes a proposal a decision to bring the affair into a more legitimate and more credible, context.

The results may already be obvious. Throughout the sonnets the poet's feelings oppose his situation; he is always aspring either to a more enjoyable or a less unpleasant state. The sonneteer seems doomed to an unrewarded labor. Unable to predict his next reaction, confused about the painful progression of his feelings, trying even to be honest even about his dishonesty--"for poets are eigned to lie, and I / For you a liar am a thousand times." Perhaps his most significant lie is the most implicit: he assumes the continued intensity of his love for Lise, judges his victory by the extent of her involvement in the affair. He succeeds, of course, in enticing her fully into skulking love: but then he discovers he must have her complete fidelity, which she apparently grants. Perhaps we should see it coming, we know him well enough to know, or guess, what comes next; but his rhetoric caught us too. We probably never suspected that his excitement about Lise would melt into spent weariness:

Most strange, my change, this nervous interim.--

The utter courtship ended, tokens won,

Assurance slated down . . . all this to stun

More than excite: I think about the grim

And dull and anxious, rather than I skim

Light bright & confident: like a weak pun

I stumble neither way: Hope weighs a ton:

Tired certainly, but much less tired than dim.

--I were absence' adept, a glaring eye;

Or I were agile to this joy, this letter,

You say from Fox Hill: "I am not the same."--

No more am I: I'm neither: without you I

Am not myself. My sight is dying. Better

The searchlights' torture which we overcame!