I would be married, but I’d have no wife,
I would be married to a single life.

The couplet plays on the paradox of being “married” while refusing a literal spouse, using marriage as a metaphor for a vowed or chosen state of life. Read in the context of early modern religious and moral discourse, “single life” can imply celibacy, spiritual dedication, or a deliberate withdrawal from worldly attachments. The wit lies in treating singleness as a partner—something one can commit to with the seriousness of marriage—suggesting that the speaker’s deepest fidelity is to an inward or higher calling rather than to domestic union. The lines also echo the period’s fondness for epigrammatic antithesis: desire for the form of commitment, coupled with rejection of its conventional object.