Looking for the Perfect Wedding Poem

Comments (26)

• On March 5, 2009 at 7:16 am Mairead wrote:

  This poem may have one too many specifics (the country, June) for general use, but it’s one of my favorites, so I thought I’d share regardless:
  [As if I craved error, as if love was ahistorical]
  Claudia Rankine
  As if I craved error, as if love was ahistorical,
  I came to live in a country not at first my own
  and here came to love a man not stopped by reticence.
  And because it seemed right
  love of this man would look like freedom,
  the lone expanse of his back
  would be found land, I turned,
  as a brown field turns, suddenly grown green,
  for this was the marriage waited for: the man
  desiring as I, movement toward mindful and yet.
  It was June, brilliant. The sun higher than God.
  *
  I ditto the Jack Gilbert recommendation, though, & thanks for sharing your own suggestions! I hadn’t read them before & they’re lovely.

• On March 5, 2009 at 7:23 am Andrew wrote:

  hi camille–i found a great one on the poetry foundation’s poetry tool by gary snyder called “a maul for bill and cindy’s wedding.” it’s really lovely, and a well-wishing poem. also, reginald shephard’s “you, therefore” is almost a little bit distant but towards the end really shines immensely.

• On March 5, 2009 at 8:03 am C. Dale wrote:

  My partner and I had our religious ceremony at a vineyard in Sonoma a few years ago. The poems in our ceremony included Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke With You” and this poem, “Tree Marriage,” by William Meredith:
  TREE MARRIAGE
  In Chota Nagpur and Bengal
  the betrothed are tied with threads to
  mango trees, they marry the trees
  as well as one another, and
  the two trees marry each other.
  Could we do that some time with oaks
  or beeches? This gossamer we
  hold each other with, this web
  of love and habit is not enough.
  In mistrust of heavier ties,
  I would like tree-siblings for us,
  standing together somewhere, two
  trees married with us, lightly, their
  fingers barely touching in sleep,
  our threads invisible but holding.

• On March 5, 2009 at 9:12 am Jordan wrote:

  Gregory Corso’s poem is ok for a certain kind of wedding.
  I read selections from George Herbert’s collection of proverbs at my sister’s reception. It seemed to go well.
  I’ve never heard of anyone reading Spenser’s Epithalamion at a ceremony, reception, or anywhere else, actually.
  If you want to destroy the event and cast the future of the couple in gloom, Marianne Moore’s poem “Marriage” is just the thing. (Oops!)

• On March 5, 2009 at 9:47 am Don Share wrote:

  “In Love Made Visible” by May Swenson
  Sonnet XVII by Neruda, trans. Stephen Mitchell

• On March 5, 2009 at 10:50 am james stotts wrote:

  ‘on st. valentine’s’
  by some ungenerous guess i took you for perfect
  when i took you for better or worse
  and the nature i so readily accepted
  in february’s shapeshifting rains
  i still somehow neglected—
  that you should yourself be like those floating seeds
  drifting toward the spring
  falling earthward as you gather dew
  but the consequence was plain
  that i should also be enlightened when i married you

• On March 5, 2009 at 11:16 am Sandra Beasley wrote:

  For a giddier, less formal wedding I recommend this poem by Jeffrey McDaniel, from his book THE SPLINTER FACTORY:
  The Archipelago Of Kisses
  We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don’t
  grow on trees, like in the old days. So where
  does one find love? When you’re sixteen it’s easy,
  like being unleashed with a credit card
  in a department store of kisses. There’s the first kiss.
  The sloppy kiss. The peck.
  The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we
  shouldn’t be doing this kiss. The but your lips
  taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.
  The I wish you’d quit smoking kiss.
  The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad
  sometimes kiss. The I know
  your tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you get
  older, kisses become scarce. You’ll be driving
  home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road,
  with its purple thumb out. If you
  were younger, you’d pull over, slide open the mouth’s
  red door just to see how it fits. Oh where
  does one find love? If you rub two glances, you get a smile.
  Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.
  Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss.
  Now what? Don’t invite the kiss over
  and answer the door in your underwear. It’ll get suspicious
  and stare at your toes. Don’t water the kiss with whiskey.
  It’ll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters,
  but in the morning it’ll be ashamed and sneak out of
  your body without saying good-bye,
  and you’ll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left
  on the inside of your mouth. You must
  nurture the kiss. Turn out the lights. Notice how it
  illuminates the room. Hold it to your chest
  and wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from a
  special beach. Place it on the tongue’s pillow,
  then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia: beneath
  a Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.
  But one kiss levitates above all the others. The
  intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.
  The I’ll love you through a brick wall kiss.
  Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the Earth,
  like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.
  –Jeffrey McDaniel
  …He’d probably kill me for labeling this a “wedding poem,” but so it goes!
  Cheers,
  Sandra Beasley
  Washington, DC

• On March 5, 2009 at 11:46 am Don Share wrote:

  Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the handy list of Poetry Tool wedding poems!

• On March 5, 2009 at 12:09 pm Jana wrote:

  If you’d like a touch of formal verse, this lovely poem by Christina Rossetti might do:
  “I wish I could remember that first day”
  BY CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
  Era gia l’ora che volge il desio. – Dante
  Ricorro al tempo ch’io vi vidi prima. – Petrarca
  I wish I could remember that first day,
  First hour, first moment of your meeting me,
  If bright or dim the season, it might be
  Summer or Winter for aught I can say;
  So unrecorded did it slip away,
  So blind was I to see and to foresee,
  So dull to mark the budding of my tree
  That would not blossom yet for many a May.
  If only I could recollect it, such
  A day of days! I let it come and go
  As traceless as a thaw of bygone snow;
  It seemed to mean so little, meant so much;
  If only now I could recall that touch,
  First touch of hand in hand – Did one but know!

• On March 5, 2009 at 12:56 pm Matt T. wrote:

  Hi Camille,
  Lots of great suggestions here. I would also suggest a classic no one’s mentioned yet, Robert Burns’ “A Red, Red Rose.” The meaning is timeless, and the “bonny lass” bit could be subtley reworded, if necessary (I can’t tell from your post whether your friends are women or men).
  And to echo Don’s suggestion, I read Neruda’s “Sonnet XVII” at a friend’s wedding and it went over very well.
  The anthology “Into the Garden,” edited by Robert Hass and Stephen Mitchell, is a good place to look for wedding poems.
  With best wishes for the happy couple,
  Matthew Thorburn

• On March 5, 2009 at 3:36 pm Paul wrote:

  “Double Happiness Helix” by Paul Squires.

• On March 5, 2009 at 7:01 pm Rob Taylor wrote:

  My pick – in the short and somewhat sweet category – would be another Rukeyser poem, “Islands”: “O for God’s sake / they are connected / underneath”. I was married last summer and planned to print it on our bulletins for the church service, but didn’t have the room…

• On March 5, 2009 at 7:46 pm Jason Guriel wrote:

  Camille, as an extension of my last post, I was thinking about doing a reading of an occasional poem by George Johnston. (I believe Annie was curious about seeing one of his occasional poems.) I have a feeling, though, I’ll probably just read one of Johnston’s non-occasional poems instead, since there’s one poem I’ve been thinking about for awhile, but here are the last two verse paragraphs of Johnston’s “A Marriage Poem for Peg and John”. Perhaps the title’s specificity reduces the poem’s utility, but the end is still lovely:
  Married life is what
  one makes it; there is luck,
  blissful times – and not,
  thin and thick,
  just sitting it out;
  all part of the life.
  May you make the lot.
  May Content alight,
  that sly comer
  whose look bemuses pain;
  may he preen his wing
  and sing
  and sing again,
  and as the years narrow
  against oncoming night,
  his golden, late note.
  Alas, Harriet messes up the indentation (lines 3-6 from the first vp and lines 2-3 and 7-8 from the 2nd vp all share an indented margin).

• On March 6, 2009 at 10:25 am Mary Meriam wrote:

  Camille, I tried to post my poem “Let’s Marae!” but I guess Harriet doesn’t want to post it -whatever- but if you click on my name below, it’s a link to the poem, which I wrote last summer when everyone was getting married in CA.

• On March 6, 2009 at 10:59 am aimee nezhukumatathil wrote:

  Hi Camille–Not sure if your friends are writers or not, but my husband and I used this one in our wedding program, by Linda Pastan:
  Love Poem
  I want to write you
  a love poem as headlong
  as our creek
  after thaw
  when we stand
  on its dangerous
  banks and watch it carry
  with it every twig
  every dry leaf and branch
  in its path
  every scruple
  when we see it
  so swollen
  with runoff
  that even as we watch
  we must grab
  each other
  and step back
  we must grab each
  other or
  get our shoes
  soaked we must
  grab each other
  Linda Pastan

• On March 6, 2009 at 11:18 am Annie FInch wrote:

  Fun question! Glen and I used John Donne”s “Good Morrow” at our wedding, but altered the final lines to include a passage from “On His Mistress Going to Bed.” Since then, I’ve written “A Wedding on Earth,” in CALENDARS, which I would use now if we were going to be married again (who knows, we might!!) Hope it’s a great occasion, Camille!

• On March 6, 2009 at 12:58 pm Zachariah Wells wrote:

  I tried to post “Barbed Wire,” a poem by the late Richard Outram, but it seems to have been deemed unacceptable.
  Here’s the url for the poem, along with a brief essay I wrote about it:
  http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_10_wells.php

• On March 6, 2009 at 2:15 pm thomas brady wrote:

  I do think the Jefrey McDaniel poem is a “wedding poem,” the way he elevates the ‘I Do kiss’ at the end.
  Love the Christina Rossetti!!
  There’s an anthology called ‘To Woo and to Wed’ by the poet Michael Blumenthal. Anybody seen that? It was published about 20 years ago.

• On March 6, 2009 at 2:59 pm Martha wrote:

  I’ve always loved this one:
  A Birthday
  W.S. Merwin

  Something continues and     I don't know what to call it
  though the language is full of suggestions
  in the way of language
  but they are all anonymous
  and it's almost your birthday     music next to my bones
  these nights we hear the horses     running in the rain
  it stops and the moon comes out     and we are still here
  the leaks in the roof go on dripping     after the rain has passed
  smell of ginger flowers     slips through the dark house
  down near the sea     the slow heart of the beacon flashes
  the long way to you is still tied to me     but it brought me to you
  I keep wanting to give you     what is already yours
  it is the morning     of the mornings together
  breath of summer     oh my found one
  the sleep in the same current     and each waking to you
  when I open my eyes     you are what I wanted to see.

• On March 6, 2009 at 6:24 pm Camille Dungy wrote:

  Wow! I’ve enjoyed being introduced to several poems I didn’t know and to see several I love. I’ve always adored that Pastan poem Aimee suggested, for instance. And my dear read me the Rossetti poem this morning thanks to Jana’s post. It’s never a bad thing to have a familiar love poem read to you while you’re scrambling the morning eggs.
  What a great outpouring of suggestions. Keep them coming! I’m sure there are plenty of people who would be interested in hearing even more of the Harriet community favorites.

• On March 7, 2009 at 11:49 am john wrote:

  Friends of mine were getting married and asked me to sing at the ceremony.
  “What would you like me to sing?”
  “Anything you want.”
  Gulp.
  I’d always wanted to set this Dickinson poem to music, and their invitation gave me inspiration. I am very pleased to be able to say that it seemed to fit the ceremony. I love love love how Dickinson never names what “this” is.
  It’s all I have to bring today –
  This, and my heart beside –
  This, and my heart, and all the fields –
  And all the meadows wide –
  Be sure you count — should I forget
  Some one the sum could tell –
  This, and my heart, and all the Bees
  Which in the Clover dwell.

• On March 7, 2009 at 6:51 pm Mary Ann wrote:

  Another Jack Gilbert poem, which a friend used at his wedding, is “The Abnormal Is Not Courage.”

• On March 10, 2009 at 5:42 am Sarah Browning wrote:

  Here are ones I’ve recommended to friends in the past, below. Read the Swenson at one ceremony and it was a big hit. Fun project!
  Love Is
  a rain of diamonds
  in the mind
  the soul’s fruit
  sliced in two
  a dark spring
  loosed at the lips of light
  under-earth waters
  unlocked from their lurking
  to sparkle in a crevice
  parted by the sun
  a temple
  not of stone but cloud
  beyond the heart’s roar
  and all violence
  outside the anvil-stunned domain
  unfrenzied space
  between the grains of change
  blue permanence
  one short step
  to the good ground
  the bite into bread again
  – May Swenson
  Variations on the Word Sleep
  I would like to watch you sleeping.
  I would like to watch you,
  sleeping. I would like to sleep
  with you, to enter
  your sleep as its smooth dark wave
  slides over my head
  and walk with you through that lucent
  wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
  with its watery sun & three moons
  towards the cave where you must descend,
  towards your worst fear
  I would like to give you the silver
  branch, the small white flower, the one
  word that will protect you
  from the grief at the center
  of your dream, from the grief
  at the center. I would like to follow
  you up the long stairway
  again & become
  the boat that would row you back
  carefully, a flame
  in two cupped hands
  to where your body lies
  beside me, and you enter
  it as easily as breathing in
  I would like to be the air
  that inhabits you for a moment
  only. I would like to be that unnoticed
  & that necessary.
  – Margaret Atwood
  To Drink
  I want to gather your darkness
  in my hands, to cup it like water
  and drink.
  I want this in the same way
  as I want to touch your cheek –
  it is the same –
  the way a moth will come
  to the bedroom window in late September,
  beating and beating its wings against cold glass;
  the way a horse will lower
  his long head to water, and drink,
  and pause to lift his head and look,
  and drink again,
  taking everything in with the water,
  everything.
  – Jane Hirshfield
  Love Should Grow Up Like a Wild Iris in the Fields
  Love should grow up like a wild iris in the fields,
  unexpected, after a terrible storm, opening a purple
  mouth to the rain, with not a thought to the future,
  ignorant of the grass and the graveyard of leaves
  around, forgetting its own beginning. Love should
  grow like a wild iris
  but does not.
  Love more often is to be found in kitchens at the dinner hour,
  tired out and hungry, lingers over tables in houses where
  the walls record movements, while the cook is probably angry,
  and the ingredients of the meal are budgeted, while
  a child cries feed me now and her mother not quite
  hysterical says over and over, wait just a bit, just a bit,
  love should grow up in the fields like a wild iris
  but never does
  really startle anyone, was to be expected, was to be
  predicted, is almost absurd, goes on from day to day, not quite
  blindly, gets taken to the cleaners every fall, sings old
  songs over and over, and falls on the same piece of rug that
  never gets tacked down, gives up, wants to hide, is not
  brave, knows too much, is not like an
  iris growing wild but more like
  staring into space
  in the street
  not quite sure
  which door it was, annoyed about the sidewalk being
  slippery, trying all the doors, thinking
  if love wished the world to be well, it would be well.
  Love should
  grow up like a wild iris, but doesn’t, it comes from
  the midst of everything else, sees like the iris
  of an eye, when the light is right,
  feels in blindness and when there is nothing else is
  tender, blinks, and opens face up to the skies.
  – Susan Griffin
  Love Sonnet LXXXIX
  When I die, I want your hands on my eyes:
  I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands
  to pass their freshness over me once more:
  I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.
  I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.
  I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you
  to sniff the sea’s aroma that we loved together,
  to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.
  I want what I love to continue to live,
  and you whom I love and sang above everything else
  to continue to flourish, full-flowered:
  so that you can reach everything my love directs you to,
  so that my shadow can travel along in your hair,
  so that everything can learn the reason for my song.
  – Pablo Neruda
  Sonnet XVII
  I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
  or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
  I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
  in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
  I love you as the plant that never blooms
  but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
  thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
  risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
  I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
  I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
  so I love you because I know no other way
  than this: where I does not exist, or you,
  so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
  so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
  – Pablo Neruda

• On March 12, 2009 at 9:21 am Wyn Cooper wrote:

  My wife and I used an untitled Philip Larkin poem. Part of the fun of using it was telling people we were going to use a Larkin poem, and when they asked which one, I would answer “This Be the Verse.” Which, of course, is what they were afraid of.
  Is it for now or for always,
  The world hangs on a stalk?
  Is it a trick or a trysting-place,
  The woods we have found to walk?
  Is it a mirage or a miracle,
  Your lips that lift at mine:
  And the suns like a juggler’s juggling-balls,
  Are they a sham or a sign?
  Shine out, my sudden angel,
  Break fear with breast and brow,
  I take you now and for always,
  For always is always now.

• On March 12, 2009 at 4:19 pm Diane K. Martin wrote:

  This is what my husband (godfather) read at our niece’s wedding:
  The Master Speed
  Robert Frost
  No speed of wind or water rushing by
  But you have speed far greater. You can climb
  Back up a stream of radiance to the sky,
  And back through history up the stream of time.
  And you were given this swiftness, not for haste,
  Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,
  But in the rush of everything to waste,
  That you may have the power of standing still —
  Off any still or moving thing you say.
  Two such as you with such a master speed
  Cannot be parted nor be swept away
  From one another once you are agreed
  That life is only life forevermore
  Together wing to wing and oar to oar.
  We also liked Roethe’s:
  The Manifestation
  Many arrivals make us live: the tree becoming
  Green, a bird tipping the topmost bough,
  A seed pushing itself beyond itself,
  The mole making its way through darkest ground,
  The worm, intrepid scholar of the soil—
  Do these analogies perplex? A sky with clouds,
  The motion of the moon, and waves at play,
  A sea-wind pausing in a summer tree.
  What does what it should do needs nothing more.
  The body moves, though slowly, toward desire.
  We come to something without knowing why.
  And Atwood’s:
  Habitation
  Marriage is not
  a house or even a tent
  it is before that, and colder:
  The edge of the forest, the edge
  of the desert
  the unpainted stairs
  at the back where we squat
  outside, eating popcorn
  where painfully and with wonder
  at having survived even
  this far
  we are learning to make fire

• On March 13, 2009 at 12:01 pm thomas brady wrote:

  Sarah Browning,
  You chose poems redolent with metaphor, overwhelmed with them, I’d say, so that I don’t believe any of them. The “love” is too intense in all of them, so that they almost sound like stalker poems. Has this something to do with the nature of metaphor? We know that Shakespeare famously mocked the use of metaphor (my mistress is not like any of those things at all).
  Please don’t take this the wrong way, Sarah; I’m just speculating on my own feelings and how aesthetics might be affecting them; for some reason when I read a lot of metaphor I’m hyper aware that the poet is lying–and not necessarily in a good way; maybe it’s because of my reading of Shakespeare, I’m not sure…
  The use of meter and rhyme by the Frost and Larkin which come after is more to my liking. I trust brevity and meter and rhyme more than I do ambitious metaphor.
  I certainly don’t want to rain on a happy wedding thread, but I couldn’t help but make this observation. Love is not love if it is not true, etc
  I hope you’ll forgive me, Sarah.
  Thomas