LAUER - Bartletts Words for the Wedding

Copyright 2007 by Little, Brown and Company, Inc. Foreword copyright 2007 by Anita Shreve Introduction copyright 2007 by Brett Fletcher Lauer and Aimee Kelley All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Little, Brown and Company Hachette Book Group 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com The Little, Brown and Company name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc. First eBook Edition: January 2007 ISBN: 978-0-7595-1644-1 THE BARTLETTS LIBRARY Bartletts Familiar Quotations, Seventeenth Edition Bartletts Book of AnecdotesBartletts Rogets ThesaurusBartletts Poems for OccasionsBartletts Bible QuotationsBartletts Shakespeare QuotationsBartletts Words to Live ByBartletts Words for the Wedding The wedding ceremony is the most festive of all celebrations.

In one event, spanning three or four hours, the best of what we have to offer as human beings is on display: hope, love, honor, promise, beauty, commitment, and a vision of the ideal. We wish as well for more than a pinch of humor, sexuality, and playfulness added to the mix. We love weddings, even if what we love best is the chance to drink champagne and dance. We are quiet as the vows are read, we pay close attention to the toasts at the reception, and sometimes, with a look or in the squeeze of a hand, we renew our own vows with the man or woman sitting next to us. For those of us not yet married, a sense of sparkle is in the air: all things seem possible. Many a wedding has begun at the wedding of another.

For the traditional and conventional, the time-honored words of the wedding ceremony and the toasts are writ in stone; there is a sense of solemnity inherent in repeating vows others have uttered before. For the rest of us, the magnificence of the event requires some invention, creativity, or a personal stamp. We look for passages or fragments of poems that speak to the ceremony and its attributes and say what we wish to say to each other or to our families and guests. Prior to this volume, finding those precise passages was often arduous and time consuming. I remember, before my own wedding, desperately searching for a passage that would suggest a love affair in which the lovers had met as youths, had to separate for a long time, and then, later in life, found each other again. Quite a tall order.

I dont recall now which books I consulted to find the relevant passage (doubtless I looked at Bartletts original), but I do remember that it took a while. I certainly could have used the compendium you hold in your hands. What strikes me most about the wonderful assortment of selections that Brett Fletcher Lauer and Aimee Kelley have here assembled is its eclectic nature and its diversity. We have Irish blessings, Shakespearean sonnets, Biblical verses, Chinese words of wisdom, priestly proclamations, German love letters, ancient Egyptian poems, and contemporary takes on modern love. Some of the material is familiar and will produce aha moments: Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit / impediments... (William Shakespeare).

Some of it requires a bit of thought: Between us, the distance of field is green / and exact; the sun gleams from its cloudless height I know / that there is enough time, that there is always enough. / Please. Come to me, remember me: undo this world (Oni Buchanan). Other selections are downright exuberant: here is the deepest secret nobody knows / (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud / and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows / higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) / and this is the wonder thats keeping the stars apart // i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart) (E. E. Cummings).

And some passages are simply bewildering: You pried open an oyster / and kept your eyes shut. / You poured yourself a glass of cold vodka / and did not offer me any (Dara Wier). Im imagining the bridegroom, hands trembling, knees knocking, reciting these lines in heartfelt voice to his beloved baffled guests notwithstanding. Couples seeking couplets to redefine love and marriage will be more than satisfied with the assortment of selections herein. Ministers, priests, and rabbis looking for an arresting homily will likely be relieved and pleased by these offerings. Brides wishing to express, the second time around, that old adage about hope triumphing over experience will not be disappointed.

Tongue-tied men in search of words to propose marriage will have a plethora of intriguing and certain-to-be-successful gambits. Even the best man, looking for a suitable and not-terribly-embarrassing toast, will find a host of possibilities. Passion, order, sexuality, longing, persistence, and even the power of words themselves are celebrated. The force / of your commitment charges us we live / in the sweep of it, taking courage / one from the other (Denise Levertov). This volume is easy to use. Anyone looking for an Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnet remembered from Brit Lit need only search the table of contents.

Someone else, seeking a more religious take, can thumb through the book to Saint Augustine, Corinthians, or Ecclesiastes. Have a particular fondness for Gerard Manley Hopkins? Take a look at At the Wedding March. Perhaps your beloved is a classicist see the excerpt from Platos Symposium; or the opposite, a reader with a penchant for twentieth-century literature: Hemingway is here as are John Ashbery and Anne Sexton. You could always write your own vows, of course, but it would be the gifted poet indeed who couldnt use a little help from the pros. After the bouquet has been tossed, the last glasses collected, the final tipsy guests seen to their cars, the words of the wedding will live on. They may find themselves pasted into a scrapbook, or paper-clipped to the program, or simply scribbled down on a cocktail napkin by a listener who wants to remember them.

I imagine, years later, an unwary husband stumbling upon them and sitting back and reading them silently, remembering the moment the words were spoken and feeling something of the emotions that accompanied that wedding ceremony. Perhaps the husband will look at his wife anew. Maybe he will even get up from the couch and walk into the kitchen and embrace her. And if she laughs and asks why, possibly he will fetch the piece of paper he was looking at and read to her from the Apache Wedding Prayer: Now you are two bodies, But there is only one life before you. Go now to your dwelling place To enter into the days of your togetherness. And may your days be good And long upon the earth.

ANITA SHREVE Mark McMorris writes, Tell me in short, Love, what is a wed-ding? / A wedding is at once a crowded place / and a private room, packed with trusts / and empty of all but the hearts letters / which one other heart may read and decipher. A wedding is both a public and private ceremony, and so the readings selected must be meaningful to the couple to be married as well as to the family and friends who gather to witness the occasion. It is the address of private words to the public, words that express the nature of love and enrich the wedding ceremony, with which this anthology is concerned. In the editing process, we sought to compile a variety of expressions of the love, commitment, companionship, devotion, and trust of the marital bond. In choosing the work for this anthology, we reflected on our own experience and the amount of thought we gave to the selection of a poem for our wedding. We kept similar concerns in mind when editing this volume: Would we read these words at our own wedding? Could we imagine this selection being read at someone elses wedding? Is there a selection our nephew would enjoy? Is there a passage our grandparents would find moving? Because a wedding is also a bringing together of people a blending of households, so to speak it seemed important to represent a broad range of possibilities for a broad range of potential guests and readers.