Her Troublesome Husband
"Her Troublesome Husband" is a light comic verse by Ruth Collie, structured as a wife's affectionate litany of complaints about her husband's careless habits of dress and grooming. She catalogues his sartorial failings one by one: his neckties, which he knots so carelessly they look like a stray piece of string despite her pleading and scolding; his grey felt hat, which he stubbornly wears backwards year after year; and his cardigan vest, which he buttons wrong every time, skipping the first buttonhole and ending up mystified by the spare button left over. She extends the catalogue to his pockets, which he stuffs with scissors, pencils, books, matches, a tobacco pouch, a pipe, and a knife, turning him into what she calls a "lumpy disgrace" beside her, standing in implicit contrast to a tidy, well turned-out neighbor she holds up as the model of masculine polish. She imagines that if he would simply brush his clothes now and then and use hangers at night, he might achieve that same neat, delightful appearance. Despite the mounting inventory of grievances, each verse folds back into the same refrain: he will never be smart or stylish, she fears, and yet, all the same, he's really a dear. The poem's comedy rests on this repeated turn, in which each specific domestic irritation is undercut by the same tender, resigned affirmation of love, so that the wife's exasperation never curdles into real complaint but instead becomes a kind of backhanded tribute to a husband she finds endearing precisely because of, not despite, his rumpled, absent-minded ordinariness. The piece belongs to a genre of humorous domestic verse popular in the early twentieth century, built on gentle marital teasing rather than genuine conflict, and its structure as a sequence of stanzas united by a fixed refrain suggests it continues in this vein through further stanzas, each introducing a fresh small failing (his general resistance to being "improved") while reaffirming the same closing sentiment, so that the overall effect is a cumulative, good-humored portrait of a marriage where imperfection is treated as charm.
By Ruth Collie · Genre: Light Verse, Humorous Poetry, Domestic Comedy