Wedding Blog
And nothing feels quite right.
Picture from http://blogdelanine.blogspot.com
I love words. When I was a little girl, my mother volunteered at my school library and worked part-time at a bookstore, so there were always books in our house. She would bring them home for me and I would hide out in my room and devour title after title. Whether it was Steinbeck or Sweet Valley High, my parents encouraged me to read it, because they felt that no matter the subject, it was good to be absorbing and learning things. So as I grew up, my love of literature continued to grow and expand. After high school, I went on to take a journalism/creative writing program in college and now, as a working adult, I can rarely leave a bookstore without a bag under my arm (recently we had to buy three new bookcases to accommodate my ever growing collection of titles.)
Anyway, when we started working on our ceremony with our officiant, we decided we wanted to include a couple of readings. We have found one that we like and have plans to include another, but so far I’ve been having trouble finding a second one that works for us.
So in light of our lack of words, I figured I would turn to one of the greatest wedding resources a girl could have - the lovely Weddingbee readership - and get ideas for something that might work to fill the gap in our ceremony.
What readings did you use or are you using for your wedding? Share your knowledge and help a girl out!
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Shakespeare Sonnet 116
“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-fixed mark, That looks on tempests and is not shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Lowe’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 proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”
I presume you’ve tried indiebride vow repository? They’ve got some good ideas. We had A LOT of difficulty with this. Hard to not have the cheese factor, and or find something not totally overused. But we found some good inspiration there for our secular wedding.
oh, sorry, me again. We got a few reading options from our officiant and I thought I’d at least include the authors of them, if you’re interested in the readings let me know:
Kahlil Gibran (from The Prophet)
Thomas a Kempis, Love Is A Great Thing
Rainer Maria Rilke
Percy B. Shelley
E.E. Cummings
Neale Donald Walsch
an excerpt from Les Mis by Victor Hugo
The Art of Marriage by Eben Eugene Rexford (original circa 1800’s)
The Art of Marriage by Dr. Wilfred A. Peterson (copyright 1961)
I thought I’d chime back in and let you know that we’re using the Velveteen Rabbit (overused perhaps, but fits our style) and a great reading from Union, by Robert Fulghum, which can be found on indiebride. Good luck!
Don’t know what kind of ceremony you’re going for, but if you’re as silly as my fiance and I, you might appreciate the way this couple included the fabulous book “I Like You” into their vows:
http://goteamgo614.googlepages.com/completeceremonywording
(It’s in the reading part).
I also love this couple, who re-wrote “Green Eggs and Ham” (compliments PolkaDotBride):
http://www.polkadotbride.com/wp/index.php/2007/11/24/dr-seuss-weddings/
We’re including both Pablo Neruda’s “Sonnett XVII” (in Spanish and English), and the poem “Chamomile Tea” by Katherine Mansfield.
I love Paul Coelho, so we did a reading from the Alchemist-
The Alchemist
“When he looked into her dark eyes, and saw that her lips were poised between a laugh and silence, he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke — the language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love. Something older than humanity, more ancient than the desert. Something that exerted the same force whenever two pairs of eyes met, as had theirs here at the well. She smiled, and that was certainly an omen — the omen he had been awaiting, without even knowing he was, for all his life. The omen he had sought to find with his sheep and in his books, in the crystals and in the silence of the desert.
“It was the pure Language of the World. It required no explanation, just as the universe needs none as it travels through endless time. What the boy felt at that moment was that he was in the presence of the only woman in his life, and that, with no need for words, she recognized the same thing. He was more certain of it than of anything in the world. He had been told by his parents and grandparents that he must fall in love and really know a person before becoming committed. But maybe people who felt that way had never learned the universal language. Because, when you know that language, it’s easy to understand that someone in the world awaits you, whether it’s in the middle of the desert or in some great city. And when two such people encounter each other, and their eyes meet, the past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one’s dreams would have no meaning.”
We’re using the Irish Blessing as the conclusion to our ceremony; I think I like the second verse even more than the well-known first:
May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
The rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of his hand.
May God be with you and bless you;
May you see your children’s children.
May you be poor in misfortune,
Rich in blessings,
May you know nothing but happiness
From this day forward.
May the road rise to meet you
May the wind be always at your back
May the warm rays of sun fall upon your home
And may the hand of a friend always be near.
May green be the grass you walk on,
May blue be the skies above you,
May pure be the joys that surround you,
May true be the hearts that love you.
I’m a big fan of Ogden Nash’s “Tin Wedding Whistle”, though I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea:
Tin Wedding Whistle
Though you know it anyhow
Listen to me, darling, now,
Proving what I need not prove
How I know I love you, love.
Near and far, near and far,
I am happy where you are;
Likewise I have never larnt
How to be it where you aren’t.
Far and wide, far and wide,
I can walk with you beside;
Furthermore, I tell you what,
I sit and sulk where you are not.
Visitors remark my frown
Where you’re upstairs and I am down,
Yes, and I’m afraid I pout
When I’m indoors and you are out;
But how contentedly I view
Any room containing you.
In fact I care not where you be,
Just as long as it’s with me.
In all your absences I glimpse
Fire and flood and trolls and imps.
Is your train a minute slothful?
I goad the stationmaster wrothful.
When with friends to bridge you drive
I never know if you’re alive,
And when you linger late in shops
I long to telephone the cops.
Yet how worth the waiting for,
To see you coming through the door.
Somehow, I can be complacent
Never but with you adjacent.
Near and far, near and far,
I am happy where you are;
Likewise I have never larnt
How to be it where you aren’t.
Then grudge me not my fond endeavor,
To hold you in my sight forever;
Let none, not even you, disparage
Such a valid reason for a marriage.
I also love this little gem by Nash– more of a rehearsal dinner toast than a wedding reading, but it makes me chuckle:
A Word to Husbands
To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.
Good advice for wives too!
FYI, PoemHunter.com is a good resource ( http://www.poemhunter.com/poets/)
We used a poem called “The Third Body” by one of my favourite poets, Robert Bly, and a less well known reading from Kahlil Gibran. We’re pretty non-cheesy people, and they both were perfect for us.
The Third Body:
“A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long
at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born
in any other nation, or time, or place.
They are content to be where they are, talking or not talking.
Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know.
The man sees the way his fingers move;
he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him.
They obey a third body they have in common.
They have made a promise to love that body.
Age may come, parting may come, death will come.
A man and woman sit near each other;
as they breathe they feed someone we do not know,
someone we know of, whom we have never seen.”
I love the following:
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)
i am never without it (anywhere i go you go, my dear;
and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
“i carry your heart with me” by e.e. cummings
And in Life’s noisiest hour,
There whispers still the ceaseless Love of Thee,
The heart’s Self-solace, and soliloquy.
You mould my Hopes, you fashion me within;
And to the leading Love-throb in the Heart
Thro’ all my being all my pulses beat.
You lie in all my many Thoughts, like Light
Like the fair Light of Dawn, or summer-Eve
On rippling Stream, or cloud-reflecting Lake.
And looking to the Heaven, that bends above you
How oft I bless the Lot, that made me love you.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lines from a Notebook
For one lone soul, another lonely soul.
Each choosing each through all the weary hours,
And meeting strangely at one sudden goal,
into one beautiful perfect whole;
And life’s long night is ended, and the way
Lies open onward to eternal day.
– Edwin Arnold
Hope these help 
I know it seems out of character for me, but in my first wedding, I had 1 Corinthians 13 read. It’s not the greatest translation I’ve ever read, but you get the gist of it.
1 If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.
4 Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, 5 does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, 6 does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part; 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. 11 When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known. 13 But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.
I see that this was already mentioned but we’re also using parts of the children’s book “I like you” By Sandol Stoddard
The book is personal and silly and romantic and everything I was looking for. The end is my favorite part…
On the 4th of July I like you because it’s the 4th of July
On the fifth of July, I like you too
If you and I had some drums and some horns and some horses
If we had some hats and some flags and some fire engines
We could be a HOLIDAY
We could be a CELEBRATION
We could be a WHOLE PARADE
See what I mean?
Even if it was the 999th of July
Even if it was August
Even if it was way down at the bottom of November
Even if it was no place particular in January
I would go on choosing you
And you would go on choosing me
Over and over again
That’s how it would happen every time
I don’t know why
I guess I don’t know why I really like you
Why do I like you
I guess I just like you
I guess I just like you because I like you.
We are also using the Irish Blessing and “The Master’s Speed” by Robert Frost. Being a native New Englander, he has always been my favorite poet. He wrote it for his own son’s wedding.
No speed of wind or water rushing by
But you have speed far greater.
You can climb back up a stream of radiance to the sky,
And back through history up the stream of time.
And you were given this swiftness, not for haste
Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,
But in the rush of everything to waste,
That you may have the power of standing still–
Off any still or moving thing you say.
Two such as you with such a master speed
Can not be parted nor be swept away
From one another once you are agreed
That life is only life forevermore
Together wing to wing and oar to oar
Kind of verbose, but we believe everything it says…..
Teilhard de Chardin’s “Hymn of the Universe” Excerpt:
“Only love can bring individual beings to their perfect completion, as individuals, by uniting them one with another, because only love takes possession of them and unites them by what lies deepest within them. This is simply a fact of our everyday experience. For indeed at what moment do lovers come into the most complete possession of themselves if not when they say that they are lost in one another? And is not love all the time achieving - in couples, in teams, all around us - the magical and reputedly contradictory feat of personalizing through totalizing? And why should not what is thus daily achieved on a small scale be repeated one day on world-wide dimensions?
Humanity, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals and peoples, the paradoxical conciliation of the element with the whole, of the one with the many: all these are regarded as utopian fantasies, yet they are biologically necessary; and if we would see them made flesh in the world what more need we do than imagine our power to love growing and broadening, till it can embrace the totality of human beings and of the earth?”
WOW, some GREAT poems here!!! I *LOVE* that Robert Bly poem and will definitely be using it! I’m sooo excited to find it- thank you BRS! We’re naming our tables after poets and putting one of their poems on each table, too. We were one poet short. This is perfect.
“I like you” By Sandol Stoddard is So.Cute, too!!
Here are other ones we are using:
Elizabeth Barret Browning, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”
Langston Hughes “Juke Box Love Song”
Maya Angelou, “Touched By An Angel”
Shel Silverstein “Hug O’ War”
Kahlil Gibran “The Prophet”
Rainer Maria Rilke “Love Song”
Rumi “A Moment of Happiness”
John Cooper Clark “I wanna be yours”
Pablo Neruda “I do not love you”
Joy Harjo “Mad Love”
Ralph Waldo Emerson “Give All to Love”
Walt Whitman “Leaves of Grass”
Rabindranath Tagore “I seem to have loved you”
William Shakespeare “Sonnet 116″
e.e. cummings “i thank you God for this most amazing day”
& the odd stanza chosen from poems by:
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Mary Oliver
Sappho
these are so beautifull–i’m tearing up reading some of them and i’m at work! (good thing it’s allergy season so i can tell people i have itchy eyes!)
my fiance and i haven’t gotten to this part of the wedding planning yet but this is one of the readings i was hoping to have during our ceremony, it’s one of the chapters from The Little Prince one of my favorite books:
My life is very monotonous,” the fox said. “I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat…”
The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time.
“Please– tame me!” he said.
“I want to, very much,” the little prince replied. “But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.”
“One only understands the things that one tames,” said the fox. “Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me…”
“What must I do, to tame you?” asked the little prince.
“You must be very patient,” replied the fox. “First you will sit down at a little distance from me– like that– in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day…”
The next day the little prince came back.
“It would have been better to come back at the same hour,” said the fox. “If, for example, you come at four o’clock in the afternoon, then at three o’clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o’clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you… One must observe the proper rites…”
“What is a rite?” asked the little prince.
“Those also are actions too often neglected,” said the fox. “They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours. There is a rite, for example, among my hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So Thursday is a wonderful day for me! I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day would be like every other day, and I should never have any vacation at all.”
So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near–
“Ah,” said the fox, “I shall cry.”
“It is your own fault,” said the little prince. “I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you…”
“Yes, that is so,” said the fox.
“But now you are going to cry!” said the little prince.
“Yes, that is so,” said the fox.
“Then it has done you no good at all!”
“It has done me good,” said the fox, “because of the color of the wheat fields.” And then he added:
“Go and look again at the roses. You will understand now that yours is unique in all the world. Then come back to say goodbye to me, and I will make you a present of a secret.”
The little prince went away, to look again at the roses.
“You are not at all like my rose,” he said. “As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.”
And the roses were very much embarassed.
“You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he went on. “One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you– the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or ever sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.
And he went back to meet the fox.
“Goodbye,” he said.
“Goodbye,” said the fox. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
“What is essential is invisible to the eye,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
“It is the time I have wasted for my rose–” said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.
“Men have forgotten this truth,” said the fox. “But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose…”
“I am responsible for my rose,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.
We’re only having two readings - ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by William Butler Yeats (mine), and an excerpt from the I Ching (his):
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.
- Yeats
When two people are at one
in their inmost hearts
They shatter even the strength of iron
or of bronze
And when two people understand each other
in their inmost hearts
Their words are sweet and strong
like the fragrance of orchids.
- I Ching
I think we’re going with He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, too. I love that one. So many great ideas here!
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Mrs. Hummingbird, Toronto
Age and Occupation: 25, Publishing Coordinator
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 24, Videogame Designer/Cartoonist
Engagement Date: May 4, 2007
Wedding Date: June 28, 2008
Blogging Since: September 18, 2007
Venue: A garden wedding followed by a tented reception on Mr. Hummingbird's father's property.
About Me: I’m a pop culture loving, vintage obsessed foodie living in Canada’s biggest city with my fantastic fiancé and our lovable fluffy cat Bettie. I’m stoked to marry my best friend and to throw what I hope will be
the most fun and colourful party of our lives.
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