For Shakespeare it is an ‘ever-fixed mark’, for Larkin it is a source of cynicism and renewal. This month, vow to reflect on wedlock with all its passions, trials and tribulations, then post your poems in the comments
In the wake of last month’s historic Irish referendum vote to legalise same-sex marriage, it struck me that a Poster poems challenge to celebrate the august institution of wedlock might just be in order. There is, after all, something profoundly poetic about a popular vote to second Shakespeare’s refusal to admit impediment to a marriage of true minds, regardless of gender.
Weddings have always been occasions for celebration, and it is not unusual to find poets writing odes on marriage – both their own and other people’s. One of the earliest and best English poems to mark the union of others is Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion, which was written as a “Spousall Verse in Honour of the Double Marriage of Ladie Elizabeth and Ladie Katherine Somerset”. It’s a poem of great charm, and the refrain, “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song,” is one of the best-known lines of poetry in the language.
Continue reading...