You know what, actually after mulling in over some time, I'm actually going to go out on a limb and outright disagree with Alan. The ending, and including the last line, of The More Loving One, is actually good. This poem sort of worked its way under my skin, in part because I was trying to figure out what the last line had that I liked. As I said before, the rhyme and simple language I think makes it easy to see the last line as an afterthought, an amusement, dashed off. Though it is humorous, it's also sad because it fuses the central struggle of the poem together. The narrator is struggling with his intellectual understanding of the way things are, but that often makes no difference to the emotions. He knows that life goes on no matter the loss, and that one can even get used to and come to love the absence. But that is an intellectual understanding, and his emotions will need time. Even without the biographical context (which Len kindly supplied) this poem is clearly about love lost, and it is a bit more subtle and rich than I first thought. So, in my earlier post I said the poem was "a good minor lyric," and now I think it is a very good minor lyric.
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