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“The Wedding” Introduction
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"The Wedding" was first published by the British-Pakistani poet Moniza Alvi in her second collection, A Bowl of Warm Air (1996). The speaker, a new bride, goes through a surreal wedding ceremony during which abrasive guests overwhelm her with their Englishness and she can't face her groom. After admitting that she'd wanted to marry Pakistan itself (an idealized version of it, at least), the poem ends with the new couple experiencing "turbulence" as they finally look at each other directly. Through a dreamlike account of this strange ritual, which might be an extended metaphor for immigration and assimilation, the poem explores the confusion and disorientation that arises when one feels pulled between multiple cultures and identities.
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“The Wedding” Summary
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The speaker recalls expecting her wedding to be a low-key affair, held somewhere overlooking a forgotten city. She thought this marriage would be something sturdy to balance on her head, like a bundle of sticks or a jug of water.
But when it came along, the ceremony itself was bland—flavorless and colorless. The guests showed up sneakily, like smugglers of precious wood. Their suitcases seemed to unleash England itself.
They grabbed at the speaker's veil as though they were beggars asking drivers for money. As her dowry (a payment made from the bride's family to her husband's upon marriage), the speaker could only offer intangible things—her smile, shadow, whisper—and her house, a remarkable building made from strips of cloth and bamboo.
The speaker and her groom rode down streets that had English names, and people said that their eyes were shifting in color like traffic lights. It was still too early for the speaker and her groom to look at each other.
Instead, they looked directly in front of themselves, as if they had the power to look straight through mountains or to make new cities come to life with their breath.
The speaker would have preferred to marry Pakistan itself. She wanted a Pakistani river to be her bridal veil, and she longed to sing in the botanical gardens of the capital.
She wanted to hang onto her dreams about Pakistan, but it was a difficult task, like charming a snake.
The speaker and her groom pushed their thoughts deep into their minds, where those thoughts swim around like water buffalos. As the bride and groom faced each other, they felt shaky.
The markings on their hands looked like maps.
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“The Wedding” Themes
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Culture and Identity
The speaker of "The Wedding" says she longed for a “quiet” wedding in an idyllic version of Pakistan and a “balance[d]” marriage, yet is jolted by the disorienting reality of her union: the Englishness of the ceremony overwhelms her, and she feels exploited and disappointed by this very different culture. It’s possible to read this as an actual wedding between a Pakistani woman and a British (or Pakistani-British) man or as an extended metaphor for the difficulties of immigration and assimilation (with the speaker having moved from Pakistan to England). Either way, the poem illustrates the difficulty of finding a stable cultural identity when one's life feels split between two worlds.
The “wedding” of the poem’s title is essentially a marriage between two countries: Pakistan and England. There is immediately a kind of cultural disconnect, however, between the speaker and the English world soon to become part of her life. The speaker had hoped for a "quiet wedding / high above a lost city,” suggesting an intimate, romantic ceremony in some fantastical version of Pakistan. Yet this wasn’t what she got: the wedding "tasted of nothing" and "had little color," implying that it was bland and dull, tainted by its Englishness.
And rather than being happy for the bride, the guests seemed untrustworthy, walking around like "sandalwood smugglers" (perhaps suggesting they wanted to steal parts of the speaker’s heritage, or that the speaker felt this whole union is a way of “smuggling” that heritage out of Pakistan).
It’s possible to interpret these guests as the speaker’s actual in-laws, who are either fully British or of mixed heritage and more assimilated to British culture than the speaker is. Alternatively, the guests might be a metaphorical stand-in for England itself (with the implication that the speaker has recently immigrated). In any case, when they arrived, “England spilled out” of their suitcases; while the bride hoped for “a marriage to balance on [her] head,” England apparently knocked that balance off. The guests also "scratched" at the speaker's veil “like beggars,” an action suggesting that the speaker felt at once attacked, fetishized, and looked down upon by England.
It’s no wonder, then, that the speaker feels a deep longing for Pakistan. She says she wanted to "marry a country" and "sing in the Jinnah Gardens." But this, the speaker confesses, was a "dream," as "tricky" as a "snake"—slippery, deceptive, and hard to hold onto. Perhaps that's because her vision of Pakistan was overly romanticized and not grounded in reality. Indeed, calling her house “an incredible structure / of stiffened rags and bamboo,” she evokes pride in her Pakistani life while also calling attention to its deep poverty (and perhaps suggests that she agreed to this marriage or emigrated to make a better life for herself).
Nevertheless, the speaker's new life feels strange and alienating. The speaker and her bridegroom can't even look at each other; instead, they each stare into the distance, their eyes changing color "like traffic-lights" as though governed by some set of external rules. And when they do eventually look at each other, their thoughts are "half-submerged / like buffaloes under dark water." In other words, they don’t understand each other and struggle to communicate clearly and honestly.
Given that the groom seems to represent England itself, these images imply that the speaker isn’t yet comfortable with or certain of her relationship to this new part of her identity. The speaker ends by saying that she and her husband have "imprints like maps on our hands," implying that they're somehow defined by and/or still trying to navigate their cultural identities.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-34
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Wedding”
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Lines 1-4
I expected a ...
... pot of water.In the first stanza, the speaker discusses what she expected from the "Wedding" that gives this poem its title. She'd thought it would be "quiet," suggesting an intimate, low-key ceremony. She also thought it would take place "high above a lost city," a romantic vision that might speak to her longing for a version of Pakistan that no longer exists (if it ever did). (Note that the poem never actually says that this country is Pakistan, but it's a reasonable assumption based on Alvi's background and other poetry.)
The asyndeton of this passage evokes the speaker's feelings of disorientation. Details come thick and fast, with little explanation and no conjunctions (or even punctuation!) to guide the reader as the speaker jumps between images. For example, no sooner is the "lost city" mentioned than the speaker explains that she had also hoped her marriage would be one "to balance on my head // like a forest of sticks, a pot of water." Note, too, how the enjambment here breaks the sentence across not simply a line but an entire stanza. In doing so, it evokes the speaker's own feelings of being pulled between Pakistan and England.
In metaphorically imagining her marriage as something to "balance," the speaker might be saying that she hoped there'd be something balanced about the union itself—perhaps in the sense that the couple's families and cultures would get along. The speaker then fleshes out this metaphor with two quick similes that suggest she'd hoped her marriage would be as useful and familiar as objects that rural Pakistani women may carry home on their heads. The similes, like the mention of "a lost city" above, also suggest that the speaker has a rather romanticized vision of a simple, rural life in Pakistan.
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Lines 5-9
The ceremony tasted ...
... England spilled out.
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Lines 10-15
They scratched at ...
... rags and bamboo. -
Lines 16-21
We travelled along ...
... view each other. -
Lines 22-24
We stared straight ...
... into new cities. -
Lines 25-29
I wanted to ...
... a snake-charmer’s snake. -
Lines 30-34
Our thoughts half-submerged ...
... on our hands.
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“The Wedding” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Assonance
Assonance gives the poem musicality, linking words together and bringing metaphors and images to life.
In line 17, for instance, the long /i/ that travels through the words "my bridegroom and I" emphasizes the new connection between the speaker and her new husband. At first, that might seem romantic. But the continuation of the same assonance through the next few lines suggests the speaker feels pretty ambivalent about her marriage:
Our eyes changed colour
like traffic-lights, so they said.
The time was not ripe
for us to view each other.The speaker and her husband might be connected, but they're certainly not seeing "eye" to "eye" just yet.
Later, they have to confront that fact head-on:
we turned and faced each other
with turbulenceand imprints like maps on our hands.
The guttural /tur/ sounds of "turned" and "turbulence" suggests how difficult the couple's connection feels. But the gentle /a/ of the "maps" on their "hands" also suggests that, with work, they might find their way to an easier understanding.
Assonance also appears in the speaker's lost dream of a happier (and emphatically Pakistani) wedding:
I wanted to marry a country
take up a river for a veil sing
in the Jinnah GardensThat repeated /ih/ sound gives this wistful vision its music.
Where assonance appears in the poem:- Line 1: “quiet”
- Line 2: “high”
- Line 3: “marriage,” “balance”
- Line 4: “pot,” “water”
- Line 12: “insisted,” “simple”
- Line 17: “my bridegroom,” “I”
- Line 18: “eyes”
- Line 19: “like,” “lights”
- Line 20: “time,” “ripe”
- Line 23: “we,” “see”
- Line 24: “breathe”
- Line 26: “river,” “sing”
- Line 27: “Jinnah”
- Line 32: “turned”
- Line 33: “turbulence”
- Line 34: “maps,” “hands”
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Asyndeton
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Enjambment
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Metaphor
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Repetition
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Sibilance
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Simile
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“The Wedding” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Sandalwood
- Stealthy
- Smugglers
- Veil
- Dowry
- Bamboo
- Jinnah Gardens
- Snake-charmer
- Half-submerged
- Turbulence
- Imprints
Sandalwood-
(Location in poem: Lines 6-7: “guests arrived / stealthy as sandalwood smugglers.”)
A valuable, fragrant kind of wood.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Wedding”
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Form
This poem consists of eleven tercets (that is, three-line stanzas) and a single concluding line all on its own. Though the form looks fairly regular on the page, it also feels shifty and abrupt due to enjambments that tie stanzas together. For instance, look what happens between stanzas 6 and 7:
Our eyes changed colour
like traffic-lights, so they said.
By continuing a sentence not just past a line break, but past a stanza break, this enjambment (and the many others like it) makes the poem feel lurching and unpredictable—fitting for the general mood of dreamlike strangeness.
Meanwhile, the single lonely line at the end leaves the poem feeling tense and unresolved. The poem's form suggests that nothing in the speaker's world is clear or steady.
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Meter
"The Wedding" is written in free verse, meaning it has no strict meter. This informal, flexible shape helps to make the poem feel like a window onto the speaker's confused, dreamlike thoughts. The whole point here is that the speaker's wedding isn't a typical one, so erratic rhythms are more appropriate than a regular, predictable meter would be.
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Rhyme Scheme
This free verse poem doesn't use any rhyme scheme at all. Rhyme, in a way, is a wedding-like "union" between different words. But this poem's wedding is a strange, surreal affair, and the unpredictable sounds of the end-words reflect that disorienting mood. Strict rhymes would probably feel too stately and ceremonial for this wild and dreamlike poem.
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“The Wedding” Speaker
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The speaker is a bride, telling the story of her wedding in the first person. It's not totally clear whether she is from Pakistan or is of Pakistani descent and living in England—but she definitely longs for the former country. In lines 25-29, she says, "I wanted to marry a country"—in other words, to be with Pakistan, not with the man she marries.
Perhaps this longing reflects a romanticized "dream" of the country. Many of Alvi's early poems touch on her Pakistani-British identity; she was born in Pakistan, but her family moved to the UK when she was only a baby. This poem might draw on her own feelings about having a complex cultural identity.
Whether or not readers feel the bride is based on Alvi's own experiences, they can tell she's torn between worlds. She hardly seems happy about the wedding, and perceptively keeps an eye on the unspoken feelings lurking beneath the surface of the ceremony.
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“The Wedding” Setting
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It's not totally clear where the poem is set, but the first few stanzas probably take place somewhere in Pakistan—or a dreamy, fantastical version of Pakistan, at least. That half-imagined setting informs a lot of the speaker's references, like the "sandalwood smugglers," the "Jinnah Gardens" (which are in Lahore, the capital of Pakistan), snake-charming, and water buffaloes.
The second half of the poem, however, might move to a different country altogether. As the speaker and her new husband drive away, they "travel[] along roads with English names"—a line that might suggest either the relics of English colonialism in Pakistan or immigration to a whole new country.
This ambiguity about where its events are taking place reflects one of the poem's big themes: the struggle to feel a stable sense of connection and belonging when one's life feels split between cultures.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Wedding”
Literary Context
Moniza Alvi (1954-present) is a Pakistani-British poet. Alvi was born in Lahore to a Pakistani mother and British father, but the family moved to England shortly thereafter. This move had a major impact on Alvi's writing, particularly her earlier work. Many of her poems, this one included, examine what it feels like to feel connected to two countries at once. She characterizes her own work as focusing on a kind of "split, a split I try to mend, it could be between England and Pakistan, body and soul, or husband and wife."
Alvi's first full collection, The Country at My Shoulder, was shortlisted for the prestigious T.S. Eliot prize. Many of the poems in the book investigate questions around culture, nationhood, identity, and otherness. Her second book, A Bowl of Warm Air (in which "The Wedding" appears) touches on similar themes.
Alvi wrote her first book of poetry before she had visited Pakistan as an adult, and she has spoken of the role that the "fantasy" of Pakistan—rather than its reality—played in her early poetry. That playful, dreamy, and strange atmosphere is on full display in "The Wedding."
Alvi was selected as one of 20 New Generation poets in 1994, as a member of a group that also included writers like Simon Armitage, John Burnside, Carol Ann Duffy, and Don Paterson.
Historical Context
"The Wedding" was first published in 1996, towards the end of John Major's time as the United Kingdom's Prime Minister. By this time, a swell in immigration had made the country increasingly multicultural. In the post-war 1950s and 1960s in particular, many Pakistani immigrants came to the UK in search of work.
The relationship between Britain and Pakistan, which lurks in the background of this poem, is a long and complex one. Pakistan was once part of the British Empire, achieving independence in 1947 and Republic status in 1956. The country's initial separation from the Empire was a bloody affair resulting in thousands upon thousands of deaths and widespread suffering—another reason that many Pakistani people would eventually leave their homes.
The UK's Pakistani community remains the largest in Europe, making up almost 2% of the entire population. Alvi's family was thus part of an era of immigration that reshaped both Pakistan and the UK.
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More “The Wedding” Resources
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External Resources
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A Short Biography — Learn more about Alzi's life and work at the British Library's website.
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Alvi's Website — Visit Alvi's website to read more of her poetry.
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Alvi on Her Pakistani Heritage — Listen to a BBC dramatization of another of Alvi's poems, including an interview in which Alvi discusses the way her cultural background has influenced her writing.
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An Interview With Alvi — Read an interview in which the poet discusses her work.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Moniza Alvi
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