Free Union by Andre Breton

In the poem "Free Union", Andre Breton uses unusual characteristics to describe his wife. He focuses on particular body parts more than others. He goes from top to bottom and back to the top again. That is, he starts with images of her hair and then to her sex and finally back up to her eyes. In this poem, Andre only uses metaphors and not similes. This technique makes it much more specific. For example, by saying his "wife whose hair is a brush fire", the images are pretty vivid that his wife has wild, fiery hair. Some metaphors are easier to picture than others. An example of this is "whose waist is an hourglass." This is pretty implied. But when he says, "whose waist is the waist of an otter caught in the teeth of a tiger", this is something one would think about when referring to the waist. Andre Breton also describes body parts that are less obvious like the fingers, armpits, tongue and eyebrows. My favorite line is "My wife with eyes that are the equal of water and air and earth and fire." This is my favorite line because it is basically summing up the entire poem into that one line. To me, it means that his wife is and has everything. By referring to her eyes has having the four elements, it makes his wife sound complete. He might have saved the eyes for last because it is what he notices the most or that his wife's eyes basically tell the whole story. In the poem he does include the 4 elements by using the words fire, matches, landlocked sea, forests and steam.