Poems for Weddings
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Poems for Weddings
The "blessed bond of board and bed" is how Shakespeare once described marriage. "It is leviathan," wrote Denise Levertov on the same subject, "and we in its belly looking for joy." Or frantic Gregory Corso, imagining his own nervous wedding, described it this way:
I kiss the bride all those corny men slapping me on the backShe's all yours, boy! Ha-ha-ha! And in their eyes you could see some obscene honeymoon going on--Then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoesNiagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates!
What occasion calls for poetry--or inspires the writing of poetry--more than a wedding? Indeed, there is a long and rich tradition linking poetry to the marriage ceremony, beginning with the Greeks, who invented a form known as the epithalamium. This was a song in praise of the bride and bridegroom, sung at the door of the nuptial chamber on the wedding night. The song blessed the couple and predicted their happiness, often alluding to various nymphs, gods, and goddesses. The epithalamium was employed as a literary form for the first time by Sappho, who wrote:
Raise up the roof-tree--a wedding song! High up, carpenters--a wedding song! The bridegroom is coming, the equal of Ares, much bigger than a big man.
The form was popular with Roman writers such as Ovid, Catullus, and Claudian, but it was lost until the Renaissance, when it was revived by poets like Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Pierre Ronsard, and Torquato Tasso. Spenser's "Epithalamion" is among the finest examples of English wedding poems. Written for the author's own wedding, the poem consists of 23 stanzas meant to represent each hour of the wedding day.
