Seventeen words, no punctuation and not one finished sentence, and still a whole marriage comes into view. It is a chilly one. A woman puts on a wig to share a meal with her husband, and the title, "Keeping up appearances," tells us what the effort is for. The poem never says why she needs the wig. Judging by the imagery, hair loss through illness or age is a natural guess, but vanity or habit would fit too. Bonta leaves the cause blank and gives us only the effort and the answer to it: "his let-go hand."
Everything begins with the simile "wig like a genteel crow." The two words pull against each other. "Genteel" belongs in a drawing room, with teacups and good manners, while a crow is black, glossy, scavenging and long associated with funerals. The wig sits on her head like a bird perched there, absurd and a little sinister, yet dressed up with such dignity that the joke turns tender. The hard consonants of "genteel crow" give the line a slight croak. It is also telling that the first line holds only the wig. The woman herself shows up in the next line as a possessive, "her husband." She has been reduced to her disguise, which is perhaps what she fears.
That second line, "to eat with her husband," is deliberately plain. It is a purpose clause, flat and domestic, and the gap between the elaborate costume and the humble goal is where the poem's pathos sits. All this preparation is for an ordinary meal. The last word, "husband," also sets up a quiet echo. Its ending, "-band," is answered across the stanza break by "hand," and "crow" is matched by "go" in "let-go." There is no rhyme scheme here, only these faint sound-rhymes, but they bind the two couplets together at the very moment their meanings pull apart.
The second couplet turns to him, and the pronoun does the work. "His" opens both lines, as if the poem had sorted the couple into separate stanzas and given each one a possessive. "Let-go hand" packs a whole action into a hyphenated adjective. A hand has released something, probably hers, and the release has hardened into a permanent description. It could also mean a hand gone slack, or a man who has let go of more than a grip. The poem doesn't choose, and the ambiguity makes the gesture more troubling.
The final line, "his patent on ice," is the strangest and most rewarding. "Patent" can mean the glossy leather of a dress shoe, so we picture a polished surface sliding on ice, shiny and unstable. It can mean "obvious," as in a patent falsehood, which makes the coldness plain for anyone to see. It can also mean a legal claim, the exclusive right to an invention, so that he seems to hold the rights to coldness itself. Each reading adds something: the shine, the slip, the ownership. And "ice" sets itself against everything warm the poem has gestured toward, from hand-holding to the shared meal.
The poem's significance lies in this economy. It names no illness, gives no argument and offers no speaker's opinion. The story sits in the white space between the couplets. She is putting on a disguise, and he is not troubling to hide anything. Irony gathers in the title: "keeping up appearances" turns out to be work only one person is doing. Her wig is an artifice, while his indifference, if that is what it is, is "patent," out in the open and needing no cover. A poem this short could easily be a mere sketch, but the imagery carries real feeling. The crow-wig makes us smile at her and then ache for her, and the ice leaves us cold on his behalf.