On Giles and Joan

I found this poem, like most of the cavalier poetry, to be very entertaining. Johnson uses litotes as he tells his audience about the married couple Giles and Joan who are in accord only in the sense that they are at discord. The poem itself emphasizes this agreeance in many ways. First, it is very neatly structured with rhyming couplets and a fairly regular meter. Also, their names are very similar sounding although interestingly enough, they being with different letters. This is a great demonstration of Johnson's point that things can seem to be the same but in actuality are quite different. The poem is very patterned in that there is a line or so describing Gile's feeling and then a short sentence that states in some way that Joan concurrs. I saw this construct as having more than one potential purpose. First, it could be an obvious stab at women since he gives Joan short three to four word sentences that merely agree with Giles, which perhaps suggests that women are unintelligent and unable to think for themselves. Or it could be seen almost as an argument since we hear Giles then Joan then Giles then Joan and on and on. Of course the lines say that they are agreeing with one another but it again goes back to the idea of discord masquerading as accord. And finally I saw this pattern to suggest that maybe Joan doesn't agree. All we know is that "the like is Joan" and "all this doth Joan" and so on. It made me wonder if perhaps she didn't agree at all since we never know her own opinions, only that she supposedly agrees with those of her husband. I thought Johnson was very clever here with his construct and use of other devices to really emphasize what he is saying.