Eleven words and a one-word title are enough to hold a whole story of attachment and decay. Say the title aloud and you hear "mist," the same word that opens the poem. That small trick sets up everything else. The scene is a ship in morning mist, held by a line, and slowly rusting. What the poem is really about is what happens to things we are bound to. Every bond in it is real and every bond is wearing away.
The poem is built in two parts, a bit like a haiku. A short, atmospheric phrase, "morning mist," sets the weather and the mood. A longer line then supplies the concrete image. The second line has no main verb, so nothing in it acts. Everything simply *is* attached to something else, and the grammar feels as still as a boat tied up in fog. The sound shifts too. "Morning mist" is soft and slow, with its two m's and two stresses. The second line rolls on through eleven syllables, then stops dead on "rust," a single hard beat. The poem ends by moving from vapour to corrosion, from something you can barely see to something that eats metal.
The repeated phrase "married to" is the poem's engine. It sounds like a vow, and it links the nouns into a chain: line, ship, rust. Each noun is one short syllable, so the chain clicks along link by link. The word "line" is also open to interpretation. It could be a mooring rope or a fishing line, and a reader might even hear a line of verse, though that is only a possibility. In any case the line holds the ship in place, and the ship in turn belongs to rust. Marriage promises permanence, "till death us do part," and the poem keeps that promise in the bleakest possible way. The ship is faithful to its partner and the partner is decay. There is dark humour here, and a little tenderness as well. Calling a corroding hull a spouse makes the ruin feel almost intimate.
The first line also does quiet work for the last. Mist is tiny droplets of water hanging in the air, and damp air is exactly what makes iron rust. So the opening image is not just scenery. It is the slow cause of what the second line describes. Nothing dramatic happens in the poem, and that is the point. Rust is a process, not an event, and it works by patience.
Then there is the title. "Missed" sounds identical to "mist," so the weather is already in the word. But it also means something quite different: loss, absence, longing. The poem never says who or what is missed. Judging by the imagery, there are several possibilities. A ship held fast by a line is a ship that is no longer going anywhere, perhaps one that has missed its chance to sail. Mist also makes things hard to see, so the ship may be half-hidden, something a passer-by could miss altogether. Or someone may simply miss what the ship once was. The past tense gives the word the sound of a verdict, as if the time for acting has already gone.
Sound ties the whole piece together. "Mist," "missed" and "rust" all end in the same hard *-st*, so the final word echoes the first one like a faint rhyme. The ending is already contained in the beginning, which suits a poem about how things quietly turn into their own decline.
That compression is what makes the poem worth reading. It does not explain its feelings. It gives us fog, rope, a ship and a rhetorical trick, and it lets us supply the sadness. The word "married" carries a great deal of weight, since it turns an industrial scene into a love story that cannot end well. The pun in the title asks us to listen as well as look. Short as it is, the poem suggests that to be attached to anything is also to share its fate, whether the thing is a ship, a person or a line on a page.