She Walks in Beauty: A Woman's Journey Through Poems Read Online Free PDF Page B

showers—complete with skits, songs, and the occasional stripper. There were endless fittings for hideous dresses, but also lots of laughs and backstage drama. My wedding was no exception. Fortunately, I had a fantastic time, and life has only gotten better because I have someone to share it with.
    Each marriage is as unique as the two people in it, but universal too. Getting married is an act of hope and optimism—an affirmation of life. Every marriage, like every life, goes through its ups and downs, and the institution of marriage is challenged by personal and historical inequities. Yet the pursuit of love and the strength of a lifelong commitment remain their own rewards and the foundation of much of our social order.
    Most of these poems are romantic, realistic, wise, and funny. It’s hard not to be swept off one’s feet reading Christopher Marlowe’s poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” The romantic ideal underlying marriage is embodied by the excerpt from The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney. Its most famous line, “My true love hath my heart and I have his,” is echoed by e. e. cummings four hundred years later when he writes, “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in/my heart).”
    I have tried to include poems that examine different aspects of the marital relationship. Comparing a passage from the Book of Proverbs about the virtuous wife to Lady Mary Chudleigh’s warning in “To the Ladies” gives us a historical perspective on the relative status of husbands and wives. Not surprisingly, women come up short. There are also grim, loveless depictions like Robert Lowell’s “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage.” Even more chilling is Robert Browning’s classic “My Last Duchess,” in which the fact that the husband has murdered his wife is gradually revealed.
    At least Ogden Nash and Rudyard Kipling bring a little levity to the subject. In “A Word to Husbands” and “The Female of the Species,” they complain loudly that women dominate the home and everyone who enters it. An excerpt from John Milton’s Paradise Lost takes us back to the beginning of the “vain contest” between husband and wife, which he describes as a struggle that shall have no end.
    Fortunately, however, most poems about marriage celebrate companionship, passion, and the oneness of two people in a long-term partnership. “Letter from My Wife” is one of many poems written from prison by Nazim Hikmet, a Turkish poet jailed for his political activities. Filled with longing and the desire to be reunited before death, these poems make the reader’s heart ache. Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin’s poem “To Paula in Late Spring” reflects on the memories of a lifetime of love.
    Even though each marriage remains unique and mysterious, these poems underscore how and why getting married remains such a powerful personal and societal ideal.

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 the 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 posies,
    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’ 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.

Marriage
    GREGORY CORSO
    Should I get