Wedding vows are made of spoken words, said aloud and witnessed. In «To have and to hold», Dave Bonta takes the speaking away and hands the job to a pair of hands. The title borrows its phrase from the traditional marriage promise, yet the poem never uses the word "hold". Holding happens offstage, in the white space between the lines. Of the vow, only "have" survives in the text, and it turns up in the last line in odd company: "and have 20 other things."
That small displacement points to the poem's central idea. Commitment here is something the body does, not something the mouth declares. The poem opens with "a pair of hands" that "could love very well", an indefinite, almost anonymous pair. By the fifth line they have become "her hands", and they are doing something startlingly human: they "ask / always to marry". The idiom is turned inside out. We expect someone to ask for a hand in marriage, but here the hands themselves are the ones asking. A gesture, not a person, makes the proposal, as if the love were too physical to be put into a sentence.
The construction is as spare as the idea. There are five couplets, no capital letters and no punctuation, and the lines run from only three to six syllables. Because nothing is fenced off by full stops, the grammar wobbles, and the poem gets meaning from the wobble. "could love very well" can mean the hands are skilled at loving, but "very well" also has the sound of a grudging concession, as in "very well, then." The modal "could" keeps everything slightly provisional. The line "all felt and feel" has no clear subject or object. The tenses of "felt" and "feel" sit side by side, so past and present feeling blur together. "Felt" is also a fabric, a texture you might touch, which suits a poem so concerned with hands.
The sound patterns do the work that rhyme would usually do. There is no tidy end rhyme, but the same few sounds keep returning: "hands", "and", "end", "band". The little word "and" appears on its own in three lines and hides inside "hands" and "band", and it was already there in the title. A conjunction is a joining word, so the poem quietly makes its theme audible. "end and band" is the most compressed pairing. A "band" is a wedding ring, a circle with no end, yet the word "end" sits right beside it. One reading is that the ring promises endlessness while the poem remembers that ends exist. That is an inference, since the poem never explains the pairing, but the sound link between the two words is hard to ignore.
Repetition gives the second half its momentum. "Always" appears twice, in "always to marry" and "always to live", and the parallel makes marrying and living sound like the same continuing action. Then the last line breaks the mood. After the grand word "always" comes the flat numeral "20" and the shrugging phrase "other things." The number is plain and a little comic. It suggests that the hands which marry and live are also busy with errands, tasks and clutter. This is the poem's most original move. Instead of presenting marriage as a single solemn moment, it spreads it across ordinary, crowded days. The missing full stop leaves the list open, so there could be a twenty-first thing.
The poem matters because it shows how much can be done with so little. Bonta takes one of the most familiar phrases in the English language, one that often goes by unheard, and makes it fresh by approaching it through a single part of the body. The poem avoids sentimental vocabulary, and its closing line makes love and the everyday sit in the same sentence. The reader is left holding the very thing the title promised and the text withheld.