Weddings are meant to be the loudest, most crowded days of a life, which is why Balachandran V's choice of one to show loneliness is so striking. In "The Wedding" the speaker stands at an altar, takes a bride and kisses her. Only in the last lines do we learn that the bride is Solitude. The central idea is quiet and unsettling: a person can reach a point where being alone is no longer something that happens to him but something he formally and deliberately accepts.
The setting does much of the work before any vow is spoken. The chapel is "ten by eight," a measurement so exact and so small that it feels less like a church than a cell, a room someone has paced out many times. The poem never says what the room really is, and a reader should not guess. What matters is the sense of narrowing. The guests are "ghosts from the past" who "crowded – stood mute," and "crowded" is a cruel little joke, since the room is full of people who are not really there. Judging by the phrase, they are memories of people once close to him. Then the Wedding March is "played / In silence – / For all gathered / Were deaf." The guests are mute and also deaf, so nobody can speak to him and nobody can hear. The music exists, but no one can receive it.
Next the speaker splits in two. The questions of the ceremony, "Do thee, Bala, take her / For your wife?", come from an officiant who never appears. The groom answers: "I do, I said, I will." He is both the priest who asks and the man who consents. Even the grammar wobbles, with the old-fashioned "thee" sitting beside the everyday "your," as if the service were being half remembered rather than conducted. The vows pile up in a list, "Feed her, clothe her, cherish her," which moves from the body to the heart. The repeated "her" gives the lines a tender, steady beat while keeping the bride a pronoun without a face. The ending depends on that withheld identity.
Then comes the turn: "You may then kiss / The bride – and I kissed –". The dash holds the breath before "Solitude, I wed thee" lands. It is the poem's only direct address, and it recasts everything before it. The traditional "till death us do part" has become "till death sets us apart," and the change matters. "Sets apart" can mean to separate, but also to isolate and make distinct, which is exactly what solitude does. There is a crack in the final promise too. He vows to stay "forever and ever," then repeats the old limit, "Till death sets us apart," in the very next line. Forever and "till death" are not the same length of time. Whether that is resignation, a flicker of hope that only death can end the loneliness, or the dry humour of a man who has read the small print, the poem leaves open.
The form suits this restraint. It is free verse with no rhyme scheme, and many of the lines are only a word or two long: "A wedding." "I stood / Waiting." Silence opens up between them. Small echoes do the work rhyme might have done. "Stood" appears twice, once for the ghosts and once for the speaker, which quietly puts him among them. "Wedding" and "Waiting" begin with the same sound, as though one has worn down into the other. The repeated closing line behaves like a congregation's response, and the dashes work as held breaths. The spelling "alter" for "altar" is probably a slip, but it fits: this is where a life is altered.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. It borrows the most familiar ritual there is and turns it inside out. Instead of a union of two people, we get one man performing every role while an audience of absences looks on. The language is plain, almost conversational, and that plainness keeps the sadness from becoming melodramatic. The speaker's name appearing in the vows invites us to read the poem as personal, though the text alone cannot settle that. By the end we have been made guests at this wedding, and since the other guests are mute and deaf, we are left to say nothing as well.