Victorian Wedding Poems: Browning, Tennyson and Rossetti
Elizabeth Barrett Browning counted the ways; her husband wrote eight lines that end on a kiss. Nine Victorian poems for weddings, and how to choose among them.
Much of the best Victorian love poetry was written by people about the people they married. Elizabeth Barrett wrote Sonnets from the Portuguese in secret while Robert Browning was courting her; they married secretly in 1846 and left for Italy, and the sonnets were published in 1850. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote My Wife for Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, whom he married in San Francisco in 1880. Two families account for seven of the nine poems here: the Brownings, husband and wife, and the Rossettis, brother and sister.
Compared with the Renaissance poems on our Shakespeare page, these are more private and more domestic. They range from 1847, when Tennyson published The Princess, to 1896, when My Wife appeared after Stevenson’s death. The moods vary widely: ardent in Elizabeth Barrett Browning, sensuous in Tennyson, mysterious in Dante Gabriel Rossetti, purely glad in Christina Rossetti.
Choosing among them
If you want the classic. How Do I Love Thee? is Sonnet 43, and its list structure makes it easy for guests to follow. If you want the same poet without the familiarity, If Thou Must Love Me asks to be loved for love’s sake alone, and When Our Two Souls Stand Up Erect and Strong chooses earthly love over heaven. Pick one of the three; a run of sonnets from one sequence can blur together.
If you want joy. Christina Rossetti’s A Birthday is pure happiness in sixteen lines. Her What Is the Beginning? Love. takes about thirty seconds and has a question-and-answer rhythm a child can manage.
If the ceremony is in the evening. Tennyson’s Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal is a night-garden song, sensuous rather than solemn. It belongs at a candlelit ceremony more than a noon one.
If you have been here before. Stevenson married a divorced woman ten years his senior, and My Wife praises her as an equal. At about twenty-five seconds it is short enough to pair with almost anything. Sudden Light, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem of having somehow always known someone, suits couples who describe meeting as recognition.
Reading Victorian verse aloud
Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes in long sentences that cross line breaks, so mark your breaths in pencil before the day. In How Do I Love Thee?, give each “I love thee” a fresh start, a little differently each time, rather than building to a shout.
Summum Bonum is a single sentence. Take a breath before the last line and let the final word, “girl,” land quietly; it is the officiant’s cue. A Birthday rewards a reader who enjoys its list of silks, doves and pomegranates; “vair” is a heraldic fur, and it does not need explaining to the room.
Read slower than feels natural. Victorian poems are dense with images, and guests need time to see each one.
Pairings
How Do I Love Thee? with Summum Bonum. Wife and husband, read by two readers in that order, leading straight into the kiss.
My Wife with Captain Wentworth’s Letter. Two tributes to a love that has been tested, for a second marriage or a long engagement.
Sudden Light with The Symposium. Rossetti’s sense of recognition beside Plato’s myth of finding your other half.
For where to place readings, see the order of the ceremony.
How Do I Love Thee?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, — I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
If Thou Must Love Me
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
If thou must love me, let it be for naught
Except for love’s sake only. Do not say,
‘I love her for her smile – her look – her way
Of speaking gently,- for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day’ –
For these things in themselves, Beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee – and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry:
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity.
When Our Two Souls Stand Up Erect and Strong
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
When our two souls stand up erect and strong,
Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,
Until the lengthening wings break into fire
At either curvëd point,—what bitter wrong
Can the earth do to us, that we should not long
Be here contented? Think! In mounting higher,
The angels would press on us and aspire
To drop some golden orb of perfect song
Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay
Rather on earth, Belovëd,—where the unfit
Contrarious moods of men recoil away
And isolate pure spirits, and permit
A place to stand and love in for a day,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.
Summum Bonum
Robert Browning
All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee:
All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem:
In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea:
Breath and bloom, shade and shine,—wonder, wealth, and—how far above them—
Truth, that’s brighter than gem,
Trust, that’s purer than pearl,—
Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe,—all were for me
In the kiss of one girl.
Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.
Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.
Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.
Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.
Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.
Sudden Light
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell;
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
You have been mine before,
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow’s soar
Your neck turned so,
Some veil did fall, – – I knew it all of yore.
Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time’s eddying flight
Still with our lives our love restore
In death’s despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more?
A Birthday
Christina Rossetti
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.
Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves, and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves, and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.
What Is the Beginning? Love.
Christina Rossetti
What is the beginning? Love.
What the course. Love still.
What the goal. The goal is Love.
On a happy hill
Is there nothing then but Love?
Search we sky or earth
There is nothing out of Love
Hath perpetual worth;
All things flag but only Love,
All things fail and flee;
There is nothing left but Love
Worthy you and me.
My Wife
Robert Louis Stevenson
Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,
With eyes of gold and bramble-dew,
Steel-true and blade-straight,
The great artificer
Made my mate.
Honour, anger, valour, fire;
A love that life could never tire,
Death quench or evil stir,
The mighty master
Gave to her.
Teacher, tender, comrade, wife,
A fellow-farer true through life,
Heart-whole and soul-free
The august father
Gave to me.
