Saturday, 6 January 2007

Poetry in Weddings: Let me Count the Ways

Since most weddings are romantic and poetic, poetry has been attending them for more than two millenniums. Epithalamiums, first wedding poems of the western world, were sung by Greek and Roman poets outside the happy couple's room. During the fourteenth century the poems became more sophisticated and this change eventually led to the writing of wedding poetry by well-known poets like Donne, Jonson, Herrick, and Edmund Spenser.


Spenser wrote his famous "Epithalamion" to his young bride Elizabeth Boyle for his own wedding ceremony. "Epithalamion" starts with:


During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Spanish Jews wrote some notable poems on matrimonial themes, and in Italy, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jews and Christians offered to the couple wedding poems-sacred, romantic, or in riddles-commemorating the occasion. These poems-some one hundred lines long-were often commissioned by the rich to the famous poets of the day to be luxuriously illustrated and handwritten in calligraphy on parchment. Read More...




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