33 pages • 1-hour read
Milk and Honey
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The BreakingChapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content.
Poems 1-15 Summary
The speaker blames herself: She believes her lover will catch her if she jumps, but she knows he won’t. Her mother insists she should expect more, but the speaker gets defensive at this idea. A male figure remains so unreachable the speaker can’t even imagine he is present.
The speaker and the lover grow more estranged. He feels the relationship is ruled by fate, whereas she feels they have control of the outcome. He only says he loves her as a prelude to sexual activity.
The speaker has several realizations. While she desires him, she doesn’t need him. She is attracted to a man who hurts her. She anticipates changing as a person, but he only loves a particular version of her that will cease to exist in the future. She wants to hang on to him and save him from her evolving self. When they have sex, she fears being abandoned.
She ultimately leaves the relationship because she is losing herself.
Poems 16-30 Summary
The speaker can’t force him to love her, but also can’t just be a pit stop. She wants to feel like someone’s home and hopes she will find a new love. Her ex can give her all sorts of things, but he doesn’t respect women in general—or her in particular. She is a museum of art, but he is unwilling to look at the beauty of the paintings.
As the love dissipates, sex is no longer gratifying. Because the speaker was in love, she didn’t notice the toxic elements of her lover. She hopes, however, that he will think of her when he is with someone new.
Ruminating on old lovers, the speaker observes that we often fall in love with a person’s potential rather than the person. She is angry at her delusion that he was rare and pure. Her emotional highs are very high, which is positive, but the ensuing lows leave her broken.
Poems 30-46 Summary
She chastises the ex-boyfriend for not appreciating her efforts and ignoring her gifts. She does acknowledge however that she has been both the victim and perpetrator of distress. She tries to detach herself, but even though she goes out with others, she is still fixated on the ex. She is like music he is unable to hear, but there is a difference between him adding her into his life and them building something together.
She can’t write, because he’s metaphorically taken away her ability to express herself. She tries to shed him, like a snake its skin. He returns multiple times, but she feels used and recognizes the toxicity of the cycle. They cannot be friends; instead, the speaker ends the relationship completely. She tries to have sympathy for him, but this causes her pain.
Poems 47-62 Summary
The way someone leaves is defining. The speaker and the lover have made a game out of their relationship, but she still struggles to let go. She loses sleep over the breakup. Some days she wishes he hadn’t left; on others, she wakes up smiling, relieved to be a new person starting over. She knows she does not want him back, but she can’t stop ruminating.
She thinks she loves how he loved her, but then has an epiphany: She retains the qualities he loved whether she’s in a relationship or not. As she grows stronger, she’s frustrated by his coming in and out of her life. She decides that only self-involved people talk about how special and rare their partner is, which objectifies the person and causes harm. Because her ex can’t apologize for behaving in this selfish manner, he’s a lost cause. She makes a list of the things she needs to do to get over her heartache. She repeats that the way someone leaves tells you everything about them.
The Breaking Analysis
“The Breaking” is not just about the breaking up of the characters’ relationship, it also refers to the breaking of old habits and breaking through dangerous co-dependency to find one’s own strength.
The fissures set up at the end of “The Loving” widen and eventually shatter the couple’s relationship in this section. The speaker realizes she is overly reliant on her lover, “always jump[ing] thinking / he will catch me / at the fall” (73). However, like many young people, the speaker equates her first significant relationship with herself: Its end “will be the / death of me” (73). The speaker’s mother tries to convince the speaker that she “deserve[s] better” (74), but the speaker gets angry and denies the problem.
The lover is disengaging from the relationship. Looking for exit routes, he resorts to clichés about destiny: “if it is meant to be, fate will bring us back together” (76). In response, the speaker holds on tighter, partly because of her fear of abandonment, which started with her father. Imagery that once celebrated the depth of the love now highlights its lack: Whereas in “The Loving,” the lover wanted to know her thoughts and feelings “before reaching / for [her] waist” (46), here he starts only saying he loves her “as he slips his hand down the waistband of [her] pants” (78). The relationship has become primarily sexual.
Although she would “rather have / the darkest parts of him / than have nothing” (81), the speaker leaves the relationship because she feels used, like a “weekend getaway” (89). While the speaker still cannot fully assert herself, this insistence counters her ingrained idea that women are “pit stop[s] for men” (7).
As she realizes that her ex was toxic, she decides that the problem was his inability to see her full personhood: She “was so enough / he was not able to carry it” (95). Several metaphors expand on the idea of the ex as incapable of appreciating her inner life and beauty: The speaker compares herself to art he is unwilling to look at and music he refuses to hear. The speaker’s old traumas and learned behaviors led her into making several attribution mistakes: She deluded herself that he was rare and defined herself through his perspective rather than her own. The speaker acknowledges a measure of culpability for toxicity in the relationship.
Extricating herself from the emotional bond that still ties her to her ex is like shedding a “snakeskin” (111)—an image that underscores that the lover once felt like a part of her being and that she has outgrown him. In the moment of this triumph, he returns. She is strong enough to tell him that he cannot “have [her] / when it was convenient / and leave [her] when it was not” (112) and severs the relationship completely.
Nevertheless, the speaker still desires him: If he were to return, “all the love would rise up again” (124). However, she has an epiphany that this is an unhealthy compulsion. She realizes she “remain[s] all [the] things” (130) he loved, and that she doesn’t need to see herself through his objectification of her. The speaker needs to go her own way since her ex can’t apologize for his selfish behavior. In the concluding poem of this section, she asserts that the “way [someone] / leave[s] / tells you / everything” (135).
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