One Flesh 1966

• Simile "silence between them like a thread to hold"-thread thin and can easily be broken but they choose no to break it - contentment?
• Personification  "chastitiy faces them" - the sad life result that they're not intimate anymore 
• Metaphor  "time itself's a feather" time is soft and fragile and they're old and near death 

Elizabeth Jennings 

• 1926-2001 lived through 2 wars made her writing bleak
• known for lyric poetry
• Devout catholic 

• Irregular rhyme scheme - unpredictability of relationship.
• Pronouns - the use of "he/she" in stanza 1&2 which develops into "they" in stanza 3 - makes the reader think they're closer than they first seem to someone around.
• Contrast - the contrast of the couple being together yet apart "strangely apart yet strangely close together" - this links to the theme of the Paradox of their love which is that they're not physically together but still in love

• Nostalgic - The tone has a sense of nostalgia as its constantly refering to their past  "tossed up like flotsam from a former passion" suggests their excitement has faded like them. Now they're left with the cold wreckage that their past spark/fire has left.

• Christianity - The writer Jennings was a devout catholic and they're are several references to this in the poem, the title 'One Flesh' is a biblical reference of when two become one in marrage
• Paradox - The whole poem is about the elderly couple, Jennings' parents, that have stayed together and supposedly love each other but arent intimate anymore - the idea that Sex ≠ Love - Not physically together yet still one flesh.