Shakespeare and Renaissance Wedding Poems
Eleven poems from the age of Shakespeare, Spenser and Donne, from the most-read sonnet in English to a Jacobean wedding song almost no guest will know.
The poems on this page were written within about sixty years of one another, from Sidney’s Arcadia in the 1580s to the cell where Richard Lovelace wrote to Althea in 1642, and between them they supplied much of the language English speakers still reach for when they talk about love. They also share a habit that makes them unusually good at weddings: a Renaissance love poem rarely just describes a feeling. It makes a case, and the last lines win it. That is why so many of them end on something that sounds like a promise.
Shakespeare even borrows from the marriage service: when Sonnet 116 refuses to “admit impediments,” it echoes the Prayer Book’s question about any “just impediment” to the marriage.
Choosing among them
By mood. Sonnet 116 is steadfast; Sonnet 18 and Sonnet 29 are romantic, the second beginning in self-pity and ending with a lark singing at heaven’s gate. Sonnet 130 teases for twelve lines and turns tender in the last two. Donne’s The Good-Morrow is clever and frankly sensual. Ford’s Bridal Song is simply cheerful, which makes it a good closing reading.
By length. Sonnet 18 and the stanza from To Althea, from Prison each take about twenty seconds. Most of the others run under a minute. The Passionate Shepherd, at about seventy seconds, and The Good-Morrow, at about eighty, are the longest.
By reader. Give a nervous friend Sonnet 18 or Sidney’s My True Love Hath My Heart, whose repeated first line works like a handrail. Give Donne to a confident reader who enjoys wordplay. The Passionate Shepherd suits two voices: one reads Marlowe’s invitation, a second answers with Sir Walter Raleigh’s skeptical The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.
By setting. Marlowe’s beds of roses belong at a garden or farm wedding; Sonnet 18 is the obvious summer poem. Ben Jonson’s To Celia was set to music in the eighteenth century, so a singer can perform it instead of reading it.
Know what you are reading. Sonnets 18, 29 and 116 all fall among the first 126 of Shakespeare’s sequence, which are generally thought to be addressed to a young man, though none of the three says so. In Shakespeare’s English, the “mistress” of Sonnet 130 is the woman the poet loves, not the modern meaning of the word. And the true love in Sidney’s poem is a man: “and I have his.” None of this rules a poem out; it is simply worth knowing.
Reading Elizabethan verse aloud
Read to the punctuation, not to the end of the line. Many of these lines run straight on into the next, and pausing at every line break turns a sonnet into a chant. Where a word is printed with an apostrophe, as in “remember’d,” the poet has dropped a syllable to keep the rhythm, so drop it too. Say “thee” and “thou” plainly; they only sound quaint when the reader is embarrassed by them.
Spenser’s sonnet of the name in the sand and Donne’s poem are printed in their original spelling. Read them in modern pronunciation; nobody expects you to sound like 1595.
Above all, slow down for the couplet. A sonnet spends twelve lines building to its last two, and those are the lines guests will remember.
Pairings
Sonnet 116 with 1 Corinthians 13:4–8a. Both define love largely by what it refuses to do, one in verse and one in scripture: a natural pair for a church wedding.
The Passionate Shepherd with Song of Solomon 2:10–13. Two invitations to come away, one pastoral and playful, the other ancient and full of spring.
Sonnet 130 with Amy Lowell’s A Decade. Two poems that prefer the real person to the flattering picture, three centuries apart.
For where readings fall in the service, see the order of the ceremony.
Sonnet 116
William Shakespeare
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! It is an ever-fix’d mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.
Sonnet 18
William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate…
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet 29
William Shakespeare
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Sonnet 130
William Shakespeare
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.
One Day I Wrote Her Name upon the Strand
Edmund Spenser
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Agayne I wrote it with a second hand;
But came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray.
“Vayne man,” sayd she, “that doest in vaine assay
A mortall thing so to immortalize;
For I my selve shall lyke to this decay,
And eke my name bee wyped out lykewize.”
“Not so,” quod I; “let baser things devize
To dy in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
And in the hevens wryte your glorious name.
Where, when as death shall all the world subdew,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.”
My True Love Hath My Heart
Sir Philip Sidney
My true love hath my heart and I have his,
By just exchange one for another given
I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss,
There never was a better bargain driven
My true love hath my heart and I have his.
His heart in me keeps him and me in one,
My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides
He loves my heart, for once it was his own,
I cherish his because in me it bides
My true love hath my heart and I have his.
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Christopher Marlowe
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
And we will sit upon rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant poises,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;
A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;
A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs;
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.
The shepherds’s swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.
The Good-Morrow
John Donne
I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I
Did, till we lov’d? were we not wean’d till then?
But suck’d on countrey pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the seaven sleepers den?
T’was so; But this, all pleasures fancies bee.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desir’d, and got, t’was but a dreame of thee.
And now good morrow to our waking soules,
Which watch not one another out of feare;
For love, all love of other sights controules,
And makes one little roome, an every where.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let Maps to other, worlds on worlds have showne,
Let us possesse one world, each hath one, and is one.
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares,
And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest,
Where can we finde two better hemispheares
Without sharpe North, without declining West?
What ever dyes, was not mixt equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.
To Celia (Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes)
Ben Jonson
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup
And I’ll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee
As giving it a hope that there
It could not wither’d be;
But thou thereon didst only breathe,
And sent’st it back to me;
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself but thee!
Bridal Song
John Ford
Comforts lasting, loves increasing,
Like soft hours never ceasing:
Plenty’s pleasure, peace complying,
Without jars, or tongues envying;
Hearts by holy union wedded,
More than theirs by custom bedded;
Fruitful issues; life so graced,
Not by age to be defaced,
Budding, as the year ensu’th,
Every spring another youth:
All what thought can add beside
Crown this bridegroom and this bride!
To Althea, from Prison
Richard Lovelace
Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.
