A wedding poem usually looks outward, praising a couple from the sidelines. The word "epithalamium" means a song for the marriage chamber, and traditionally it is sung for other people. Michael John Pickering's title turns it inward: the speaker is both guest and groom (or bride), toasting the self that marriage is about to change. The poem's central idea is that marriage does not shrink a person but multiplies them. Two lives combine into something with "new vectors", and the poem is wry enough to admit that this combining is also a kind of bondage.
The opening is built like a dictionary. "To be married means / to reject rejection" is the first definition, and the rest follow as a list of infinitives with no conventional sentence around them. The speaker keeps swapping one thing for another: a trampoline for a bed, so that bouncing, solitary energy gives way to rest and intimacy. Then comes a small reversal of word order: "To talk about / walking where once / one walked about / talking." Courtship, with its aimless strolls and endless conversation, has become something more settled, and the mirror-image phrasing lets us feel both stages at once. The stanza ends in physics, with "equal and / opposite forces" given "new vectors". The odd plural "oneselves" squeezes two people into a grammar built for one.
The second stanza starts with an image of children standing "back to back" to pull on their boots. They are close but facing away, preparing separately for the same journey. The promised exchange is the most memorable idea in the poem: "I shall acquire / your memory / and you / my future." Each partner gives up their own private timeline and receives the other's. Then comes a two-line stanza, "Mimosa / means joy", which borrows the definitional tone of the opening. Mimosa is a flower, and also a drink often served at celebrations, so the line may hint at a toast. Its stark brevity is a small burst of happiness between larger thoughts.
The third stanza moves from physics to the kitchen and the laboratory. Spring "will be an / allspice / of beginnings", a pun on a single spice that tastes like many. "Mixture / has richer / texture; / compounds / unpredictable / properties" is chemistry used as an argument: combine two elements and you get something neither contained alone. The lines are clipped and aphoristic, so that each short phrase lands like a proverb. Then the poem gets playful with language. "Interinanimative" is a mouthful, and its length suits what it describes: pleasures that give life to one another. The sound play peaks in "Marriage of us more / a thesaurus / of meanings / than the Falls of Amor". Falling in love is set against marriage, and the rhyme suddenly bunches up in "weanings, / preenings, / and keenings". Those three words suggest infantile dependence, vanity and lament, all the less admirable sides of romantic drama. A thesaurus is quieter, but it is also richer, because it offers many ways of saying one thing.
The ending moves from private reflection to the public ceremony. "Surprises / of comfort and care / fill the field / full of folk" leans on a cluster of f sounds, and the speaker seems to be looking out at the wedding guests. "Organs play" is blunt and ceremonial. The final couplet, "Bondage comes / bearing gifts", is the sharpest turn. It recalls the old proverb about being wary of gifts from an enemy, but here the restraint and the present arrive together. It also echoes the epigraph, where a spouse is a "standard-bearer" who announces you "before one arrives". So the poem begins and ends with something that is carried, a banner and then presents, as though to be married is to be accompanied by a message about oneself.
The poem is worth reading because it refuses both sentimentality and cynicism. It treats marriage as an intellectual adventure, and it borrows from science, cooking and language to describe emotion. Its humour keeps the claims honest, and its last two lines suggest that the constraint of marriage can be part of what it gives.