Cake and Coffee

When I read 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day by Billy Collins, some poems captured my attention. I did not know why I liked them, but when I continued reading, I found the reasons why I liked them, they are about love relationships that ended in separation. The poems “Ever After” by Joyce Sutphen is about a person that believed she was going to be in a love story that ends up in a divorce. The poem “Please Come Late” by Hugo Williams is about a man who suffers because of his broken relationship. Both poems are apparently different, but they have many similarities.

The first similarity is that both narrators still love their ex-lovers. In “Ever After” the narrator talks about her ex-husband in a sad tone. She questions how their relationship will be after their separate lives now. The narrator states, “Who are we to each other now that / there is no us…” (Sutphen 3-4). It means that she nostalgically thinks about him and the life that they shared, she deeply wishes to be with him, but she knows that it is almost impossible because many bad things happened during her marriage, and those things caused their separation. Additionally, she does not say anything bad about him. When a relationship ends, people regret having married or having been with this person, or speak ill of the other person, but in this case she does not have anything bad to say about him. She knows that they will not be together anymore, and it makes her sad.

Equally in “Please Come Late” the narrator continues loving his ex. The narrator sees her in every face that passes by. He says “glancing round the room, / thinking everyone is you” (Williams 3-4). The narrator is thinking in her all the time. He also states “Don’t come anywhere near me / until I have gone slightly mad for love of you” (29-30). The readers infer that even though he says that he does not want to see her again, he is still madly in love with her, and he would like to be with her again.

The second similarity is that both have broken relationships. The speaker of “Ever After” is suffering due to a divorce. She says “now that / there is no us…” (3-4), she feels unhappy because her life has to change a lot after her divorce. The narrator states “as when we once posed (so young and helpless)…” (11). She feels unprotected without him because they lived together a long time. She has a flashback of the time when they got married, full of love and dreams, but now they have taken different ways. It is hard when you have a life with a person that you think is your loved one, but suddenly something happens that changes all your life.

Similarly in “Please Come Late” the narrator is living the same situation. He is separated from his loved one. The speaker is “wondering what you are doing / on the other side of town”… (11-12), the narrator does not know where she is because they apparently had a fight, and they have not seen each other for a while, so he imagines many things. He imagines that she is possibly with someone else; this situation makes him feel jealous and depressed.

The last similarity is that both narrators remember their relationship using symbols. In “Ever After,” the narrator remembers her wedding and “the tall white cake” as symbols of love (13). The white cake represents the moment when she got married full of love and happiness, but then, she mentions “with our hands (yours, mine) clasped on the knife / that was sinking into the tall white cake” (12-13). This symbolized their eventual separation, so as the knife cut deeper, their relationship kept having problems, each layer of the cake until the knife finally hit the bottom.

Correspondingly, in “Please Come Late,” the narrator mentions “I’m on my second coffee by now, eating the little bits of sugar in my cup (18-19). This cup empty of sugar is symbolic of his love and how he feels; empty without love which does not have any chance of refill.

In fact, both poems “Ever After” and “Please Come Late” are similar in many ways because both are about broken relationships that have made the narrators suffer. They are also experiencing feelings of sadness and unhappiness because their love stories do not have their happily ever after they expected.