"It is no vulgar nature I have wived." The husband's opening line sounds like a compliment, but it carries a small snobbery, and the verb gives him away. To "wive" is to acquire a wife, and the word treats her as something he has taken possession of. Over sixteen lines, his admiration for her depth turns into fear for her safety, and then into a cold, bitter question about whether the marriage is worth saving.
The first four lines build her character through sound. "Secretive, sensitive, she takes a wound" is stitched together with hissing s-sounds that carry on through "sense had swooned" and "survived", so the line itself seems to hush. The rhyme of "wound" with "swooned" joins pain to collapse, and the claim that "not a thought of vengeance had survived" makes her suffering sound like a kind of emotional blackout. The speaker admires this, but he also reads her as a case to be studied. He says she has "no confidences", yet he confidently explains what she feels, which is odd for a man who admits she tells him nothing.
In the second quatrain he turns from describing her to warning us. "O have a care of natures that are mute!" is a worldly-wise exclamation, as if he were lecturing a room. His logic is chilling in its brevity: silent people "punish you in acts: their steps are brief." The short, clipped phrasing mimics that quick journey from silence to action. Then come the questions: "What is she doing? What does she demand / From Providence or me?" Putting himself beside Providence is revealing. He sees himself as one of the powers she must appeal to, and the possibility that he is the cause of her misery slides out of view. The enjambment across "She is not one / Long to endure this torpidly, and shun / The drugs" makes the sentence tumble forward, and the horror lands in the phrase "the drugs that crowd about a woman's hand". Judging by this, he fears she may poison herself, though he never says so. The verb "crowd" makes the danger feel everywhere in the house.
Then the poem swerves into memory. A game of Forfeits, played in the snow, required him to kiss her. A forfeit is a penalty, so even the game's name makes affection a debt paid under rules. His comment, "Well performed!", is the language of the theatre, as if he were applauding an actress. Her reply is the sharpest moment in the poem: "'Tis hardly worth the money, you agree?" The line suggests that she hears his kiss as a paid service and finds it poor value. She turns his stage-language back on him and shows she has seen exactly what the moment was. After a poem of her silence, it is striking that her one quoted line is the cleverest and most wounding thing in it.
The last line is made of broken pieces: "Save her? What for? To act this wedded lie!" The two questions interrupt each other, and the exclamation marks a sudden loss of patience. Having just worried about her life, he now doubts whether it is worth rescuing, because what he would be saving is a performance. The word "act" picks up "performed", and the poem ends on the idea that both of them are playing parts. Notice too that the "lie" is shared. For a moment, the speaker sees himself as an actor as well.
The form adds to this tension. The sixteen lines, longer than a standard sonnet's fourteen, fall into four quatrains. Each one uses an enclosed rhyme pattern, ABBA, CDDC, EFFE, GHHG, so that every quatrain closes on itself like a locked room. The rhythm is a fairly regular iambic pentameter, and against that steady beat the questions and exclamations stand out as flashes of panic.
The poem matters because it refuses to let its speaker be simply sympathetic. He is concerned, intelligent, and also controlling and self-regarding. Because we only get his version, we read the wife's silence through his anxious eyes and then catch the clues, in her one retort, that she understands more than he allows. That mix of insight and blindness makes the marriage feel painfully real.