Three asterisks stand where a title should be, and the poem that follows is just as unlabelled: no names, no place, no year, only "she," "he," and a house with a floor to stare at. What it offers instead is a marriage seen entirely from the wife's side. Its central idea lands in the last two lines, "if he had died / she might have lived." The wish suggests that she is already dead in every way that matters, and that only his actual death could give her life back.
The first stanza frames her bitterness as an argument with herself. She "reasoned helplessly," a phrase that holds the whole poem in miniature: thought without power. The indented line "at least one of us is wrong" reads like a sentence surfacing uninvited. The logic that follows is deliberately knotted. Labour, love and childbirth, "knowing the worst / would come before the best," should have "driven her / to adore one like him." Who is "one like him"? The husband, perhaps, or a child. The poem never says, and the ambiguity lets her disappointment seep across both readings.
The second stanza turns to the senses, and they are unpleasant ones. The wind "reeked of dust." The paired phrases "the seeming and the looking / the fumbling and the fidgeting" jostle together like awkward bodies in a room. "They slept by turns of the screw" is a slippery line. On the surface it means taking turns, but "screw" also suggests tightening and something mechanical and crude. Judging by the imagery, intimacy has become a grinding routine. Then comes the poem's only clear rhyme, "the cock crow blared / as the morning flared." It is loud and almost comic, and the dawn it announces turns out to be a "horizon / of tawny sludge." Even the sunrise is mud.
In the third stanza she "could not help / but rust away." Rust is a household kind of decay, slow and orange and unnoticed until it has eaten through. Her face rusts too, with "yawning scornful wrinkles / revolving around her eyes," as if boredom had been written into the skin. Then the vocabulary shifts to money. She has learned "to draw a stringent line / between devotion unearned / and sentiment prepaid." Love becomes a ledger, and she refuses to pay for what she has not received.
The last stanza is the longest, and it begins with a contradiction. Her mind "closed stubbornly / against all remembrance," yet the doubly indented voice of the marriage service forces its way in: "you have taken an oath before God / for better or for worse." The vow hangs over her like a sentence passed. Her husband, meanwhile, is reduced to a "muzzle," an animal's mouth that makes "demands." What he demands is that she "acquire his version" of their "life in tandem," a phrase that makes marriage sound like two animals yoked to one cart. His own language is grand and hollow: "insufficient," "veracity," "corruption," "disquisition." These long, formal words suit a man who lectures and cannot be trusted, while her side of the poem is made of short, plain, bodily things such as floors, eyes, wrinkles and rust. The "corruption" is never named. Because we never learn what he did, the lying and the speechifying feel like the whole offence.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no regular metre, and it has no punctuation at all. Thoughts run on into each other without a full stop, much as her days must. The short lines are clipped and held-breath, and the long line "of what their life in tandem should entail" stretches out like his demands. Then two short lines close the poem, with the reversal of "died" and "lived" working almost like a mirror. Even there the missing full stop leaves the verdict hanging.
The poem matters because it avoids melodrama. Nobody is struck or shouted at, and the horror is in the sludge, the screw and the unspoken oath. It shows how a promise made in public can become the very thing that keeps someone in place.