Marriage poems
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The Talented Man
© Winthrop Mackworth Praed
DEAR Alice! you'll laugh when you know it, --
Last week, at the Duchess's ball,
The Fair Youth Sonnets (18 - 77, 87 - 126)
© William Shakespeare
Comprising the largest grouping of poems, the Fair Youth sonnets are addressed to the same young man in the Procreation Sonnets. But their themes and subjects are more drastically varied.
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Nocturne
© Li-Young Lee
That scraping of iron on iron when the wind
rises, what is it? Something the wind won’t
The Real and True and Sure
© Robert Browning
Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit,
Mere imitation of the inimitable:
Medea in Athens
© Augusta Davies Webster
Dimly I recall
some prophecy a god breathed by my mouth.
It could not err. What was it? For I think;-
it told his death¹.
Golden State
© Frank Bidart
I
To see my father
lying in pink velvet, a rosary
twined around his hands, rouged,
Twenty-year Marriage
© Ai
You keep me waiting in a truck
with its one good wheel stuck in the ditch,
Madeline. A Domestic Tale
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
My child, my child, thou leav'st me!âI shall hear
The gentle voice no more that blest mine ear
My mother’s body
© Marge Piercy
The dark socket of the year
the pit, the cave where the sun lies down
and threatens never to rise,
when despair descends softly as the snow
covering all paths and choking roads:
Interrupted Meditation
© Robert Hass
Little green involute fronds of fern at creekside.
And the sinewy clear water rushing over creekstone
Advice to Her Son on Marriage
© Mary Barber
from The Conclusion of a Letter to the Rev. Mr C
When you gain her Affection, take care to preserve it;
from A Passage to India
© Walt Whitman
Passage to India!
Lo, soul! seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.
Creole
© Robert Pinsky
I’m tired of the gods, I’m pious about the ancestors: afloat
In the wake widening behind me in time, the restive devisers.
Loves Harvest
© Henry King
Fond Lunatick forbear, why do'st thou sue
For thy affections pay e're it is due?
Loves fruits are legal use; and therefore may
Be onely taken on the marriage day.
Mountain Song
© Harriet Monroe
I have not where to lay my head:
Upon my breast no child shall lie;
For me no marriage feast is spread:
I walk alone under the sky.
Locksley Hall
© Alfred Tennyson
Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 't is early morn:
Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle-horn.
Freely Espousing
© James Schuyler
a semi-tropic night
that cast the blackest shadow
of the easily torn, untrembling banana leaf
The Wolfe New Ballad Of Jane Roney And Mary Brown
© William Makepeace Thackeray
An igstrawnary tail I vill tell you this veek
I stood in the Court of A'Beckett the Beak,
Vere Mrs. Jane Roney, a vidow, I see,
Who charged Mary Brown with a robbin of she.
An Answer to Another Persuading a Lady to Marriage
© Katherine Philips
Forbear, bold youth, alls Heaven here,
And what you do aver,
To others, courtship may appear,
Tis sacriledge to her.
