American Wedding Poems: Bradstreet, Whitman and Dickinson
From a Puritan wife’s poem first printed in 1678 to Amy Lowell’s six lines of 1919: eleven American wedding readings, with Whitman’s open road and Dickinson at her most direct.
American love poetry begins with a wife writing to her husband. Anne Bradstreet sailed to Massachusetts with Simon Bradstreet in 1630, became the first writer in England’s American colonies to publish a book of poems, and wrote the line that opens this page’s first reading: “If ever two were one, then surely we.” It was printed in 1678, after her death. The other ten readings here cover the next two and a half centuries, ending with Amy Lowell in 1919.
The range of voices is wide. There is a Puritan, the Harvard professor Longfellow, Whitman with his long open-road lines, Dickinson with her tiny exact ones, two Black poets of the 1890s, Mary Weston Fordham of Charleston and Paul Laurence Dunbar of Dayton, and two women of the early twentieth century, Sara Teasdale and Amy Lowell. What many of them share is brevity. Seven of the eleven take thirty seconds or less, which suits a courthouse wedding, a ceremony with several readers, or a line printed on a program or a scroll or bookmark.
Choosing among them
Steadfast. Bradstreet’s To My Dear and Loving Husband and Fordham’s Marriage are poems of commitment. Fordham’s echoes the old vows, for better and for worse, richer and poorer, and makes a quietly powerful prelude to them.
Adventurous. Whitman’s Camerado, I Give You My Hand is printed unaltered and ends on a question that is really a proposal; our Song of the Open Road is a lightly adapted version of earlier lines. Choose one, for a couple who met traveling or are about to move far away.
Joyful. Dunbar’s Invitation to Love welcomes love in every season and mood, and at about a minute is one of the longer readings here.
Long love. Lowell’s A Decade says in six lines what years together taste like: not red wine and honey any more, but morning bread. It is widely read as a portrait of her life with her companion, Ada Dwyer Russell, and it suits a vow renewal or a second marriage.
Know the sources. From The Song of Hiawatha is by Longfellow, a Romantic invention loosely based on Ojibwe stories, and should be credited to him. Henry van Dyke’s Time Is ends “Time is not”; the version ending “Time is eternity” is a later variant. Our Dickinson texts come from the 1890 edition, whose editors smoothed some of her wording. And Hope is the thing with feathers is not a love poem at all, which is precisely why couples who have come through a hard stretch choose it.
Reading these aloud
Bradstreet is printed in her original spelling. Two words catch readers out: “then” means than, and “persever” is stressed on the second syllable so that it rhymes with “ever.” Practice that line until it feels natural.
Dickinson’s poems are so short that pace is everything. Read them at half the speed you think, and pause before the last word of That I Did Always Love. Whitman is the opposite: long lines that need a breath at each comma and a reader who is not afraid of the sound of their own voice.
Pairings
To My Dear and Loving Husband with Ecclesiastes 4:9–12. “If ever two were one” beside “Two are better than one”: two ways of saying that a pair is stronger than either alone.
Camerado, I Give You My Hand with Ruth 1:16–17. Two promises to go wherever the other goes.
A Decade with Burns’s John Anderson, My Jo. Two short portraits of love that has lasted, for a reader who has been married a long time.
To My Dear and Loving Husband
Anne Bradstreet
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were lov’d by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me ye women if you can.
I prize thy love more then whole Mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that Rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompence.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold I pray.
Then while we live, in love lets so persever,
That when we live no more, we may live ever.
From The Song of Hiawatha
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
As unto the bow the cord is,
So unto the man is woman;
Though she bends him, she obeys him,
Though she draws him, yet she follows;
Useless each without the other!
Camerado, I Give You My Hand
Walt Whitman
Allons! the road is before us!
It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have tried it well—be not detain’d!
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.
Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
From Song of the Open Road
Walt Whitman
I do not offer the old smooth prizes,
But offer rough new prizes,
These are the days that must happen to you:
You shall not heap up what is called riches,
You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve.
However sweet the laid-up stores,
However convenient the dwellings,
You shall not remain there.
However sheltered the port,
And however calm the waters,
You shall not anchor there.
However welcome the hospitality that welcomes you
You are permitted to receive it but a little while
Afoot and lighthearted, take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before you,
The long brown path before you,
leading wherever you choose.
Say only to one another:
Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love, more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law:
Will you give me yourself?
Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
That I Did Always Love
Emily Dickinson
That I did always love,
I bring thee proof:
That till I loved
I did not love enough.
That I shall love alway,
I offer thee
That love is life,
And life hath immortality.
This, dost thou doubt, sweet?
Then have I
Nothing to show
But Calvary.
Hope is the thing with feathers
Emily Dickinson
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chilliest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity
It asked a crumb of me.
Marriage
Mary Weston Fordham
The die is cast, come weal, come woe,
Two lives are joined together,
For better or for worse, the link
Which naught but death can sever.
The die is cast, come grief, come joy
Come richer, or come poorer,
If love but binds the mystic tie,
Blest is the bridal hour.
Invitation to Love
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Come when the nights are bright with stars
Or when the moon is mellow;
Come when the sun his golden bars
Drops on the hay-field yellow.
Come in the twilight soft and gray,
Come in the night or come in the day,
Come, O Love, whene’er you may,
And you are welcome, welcome.
You are sweet, O Love, dear Love,
You are soft as the nesting dove.
Come to my heart and bring it rest
As the bird flies home to its welcome nest.
Come when my heart is full of grief
Or when my heart is merry;
Come with the falling of the leaf
Or with the redd’ning cherry.
Come when the year’s first blossom blows,
Come when the summer gleams and glows,
Come with the winter’s drifting snows,
And you are welcome, welcome.
Time Is
Henry van Dyke
Hours fly,
Flowers die:
New days,
New ways:
Pass by!
Love stays.
Time is
Too Slow for those who Wait,
Too Swift for those who Fear,
Too Long for those who Grieve,
Too Short for those who Rejoice;
But for those who Love,
Time is not.
I Would Live in Your Love
Sara Teasdale
I would live in your love as the sea-grasses live in the sea,
Borne up by each wave as it passes, drawn down by each wave that recedes;
I would empty my soul of the dreams that have gathered in me,
I would beat with your heart as it beats, I would follow your soul as it leads.
A Decade
Amy Lowell
When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.
