Organization: Penn State University
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 12:00:32 EST
From: Sonja Kueppers <SEK@psuvm.psu.edu>
Newsgroups: soc.couples
Subject: Re: Readings for Wedding

Here are some wedding reading ideas.  The first ones I came up
with, the latter ones are based on suggestions by soc.couples
readers.

Understand, I'll slip quietly
away from the noisy crowd
when I see the pale
stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.

I'll pursue solitary pathways
through the pale twilit meadows,
with only this one dream:
You come too.

Ranier Maria Rilke, from "First Poems", translated by
  M.D. Herter Norton
(I will look it up and have it read in the original German
 if I decide to use it.  Rilke is a great poet, and I can tell by
 reading it that the translation leaves much to be desired.)

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face...

William Butler Yeats, from "When You Are Old"

The essence of a good marriage is a respect for each other's
personality combined with that deep intimacy, physical, mental,
and spiritual, which makes a serious love between man and woman
the most fructifying of all human experiences. Such love, like
everything that is great and precious, demands its own morality,
and frequently entails a sacrifice of the less to the greater;
but such sacrifice must be voluntary, for, where it is not,
it will destroy the very basis of the love for the sake of which
it is made.

Bertrand Russell, from "Marriage and Morals"

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting
emotion, but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy
or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting and significant than
any romance, however passionate.

W.H. Auden

The following were suggested by respondents to my post:

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 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 is error, and upon me prov'd,
  I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI

Now there will be no more rain
  For each of you will be shelter for the other.
Now there will be no more cold
  For each of you will be warmth to the other.
Now there will be no darkness
  For you are one another's light.
Now there will be no loneliness
  For you are a companion to the other.
Now there are two persons
  But there is only one life for you.
Go now to your dwelling place,
Continue in the days of your togetherness,
And may your days be happy and full upon the Earth.

Apache Wedding Prayer

I promise to give you the best of myself...
And to ask of you no more than you can give.

I promise to accept you the way you are...
I fell in love with you for the qualities, abilities,
        and outlook on life that you have,
And I won't try to reshape you in a different image.

I promise to respect you as a person...
With your own interests, desires, and needs,
And to realize that those are sometimes different --
        but no less important -- than my own.

I promise to share with you...
My time, my close attention,
And to bring joy and strength and imagination to our relationship.

I promise to keep myself open to you...
To let you see through the window of my personal world,
Into my innermost fears and feelings, secrets and dreams.

I promise to grow along with you...
To be willing to face change as we both change,
In order to keep our relationship alive and exciting.

And finally,
I promise to love you
In good times and in bad,
With all I have to give and all I feel inside...
In the only way I know how...  completely and forever.

Dorothy R. Colgan

(Other things suggested were Kahlil Gibran's passage, "Let there be
  spaces in our togetherness", other passages by Kahlil Gibran,
  a passage from "Gift from the Sea" by Anne Morrow Lindberg, and
  a passage from a sermon.)

-Sonja
------
SEK@psuvm.psu.edu SEK@PSUVM.BITNET
Love is not enough.  It must be the foundation, the cornerstone --
but not the complete structure.  It is much too pliable, too yielding.
                                            - Bette Davis