Meaning & Analysis
Thick smoke, leaking rain, and a scolding wife make the home so unpleasant that the husband prefers to leave it; domestic discomforts—physical and relational—expel him from his own house.
Insights
Domestic Uninhabitability
When the home’s ‘climate’—whether soot in the air, water from the roof, or acrimony in speech—becomes noxious, belonging collapses; a house without comfort ceases to be a refuge.
Cumulative Friction
Small, persistent irritants compound: a little smoke, a steady drip, continual nagging—together they erode patience and drive flight. The proverb teaches that attrition, not catastrophe, often breaks a household.
Voice as Weather
The ‘chiding wife’ functions like bad weather inside: words can fog the air like smoke or fall like rain, making speech itself an environmental stressor that shapes behavior.
Maintenance and Governance
Good household rule means fixing chimneys and roofs and moderating tempers. Neglect—of repairs or of civility—produces the same outcome: evacuation.
Avoidance Coping
Rather than confront, the man flees; the line captures a psychology of escape, where leaving feels rational when constant discomfort surpasses one’s tolerance.
Premodern Materiality
Open hearths and faulty chimneys filled rooms with smoke; thatch and wooden shingles leaked. The proverb arises from tangible, daily nuisances that were common and costly to remedy.
Gendered Norms
By spotlighting the ‘cursed’ or ‘shrew’ wife, the saying polices female speech and preserves patriarchal hierarchy, making women the emblem of domestic discord while naturalizing male withdrawal.
Biblical and Folk Echoes
It resonates with the biblical trope of preferring a rooftop or wilderness to a quarrelsome spouse, showing a long tradition that moralizes household peace through the figure of the scold.
Moral of Proportion
The three evils are mundane, not monstrous; the wisdom lies in attending to little leaks—physical and emotional—before they render the whole dwelling unlivable.
Rhetorical Devices
Tricolon
Lists three parallel evils—smoke, rain, scold—to produce rhythmic accumulation and a sense of inescapable pressure.
Parallelism
Balanced phrases (‘smoke, rain, and a cursed wife’) align physical discomforts with moral-social discomfort, equating their expulsive force.
Metaphor
Treats speech as environmental hazard; the ‘chiding’ voice is cast as corrosive weather inside the home.
Hyperbole
Exaggerates the impulse to flee—‘run out of doors’—to drive home how relentless irritants can overwhelm attachment.
Alliteration
Sibilants and r-sounds in ‘smoke,’ ‘rain,’ ‘cursed’/‘chiding’ add sonic bite that helps the line catch in the ear.
Transcription
Quotations
And Salamon sayth there be thynges thre, Shrewde wyues, rayne, and smokes blake Make husbandes ofte theyr houses for-sake.
[As in Eras.]. Fyre, See, Woman, thre euylls. *What thynge is more daungerous then fyer? What more perilous then the see? and what more comberous then a shrewed wyfe?
A hundred tymes and mo.. wyues and smoke cause men there hous to for go.
There are three thinges that suffer not a man to abyde in his owne house. Smooke, Rayne, and an evil wyfe.
Three euils haunt a house, rayne, a wicked woman, or a shrew, and smoke.
Foure things driues a man from hys house. 1. Too much smoke. 2. A dropping roofe. 3. A fylthie ayre. 4. And a brawling woman.
There are three things that make a man weary of his house, a smoking chimney, a dropping eues, and a brauling woman.
Smoak, a dropping gutter, and a scold, cast the good man out of his hold.
Smoke, rain, and a woman without reason, drives a man out of his mansion.
A House with a Reek, and a Wife with a Reerd [a scolding noise], will soon make a Man run to the Door.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.