Re: wedding material??

["Kathryn Miles" <kmiles@unity.edu>]

This is much more fun than grading essays!  My husband and I used an e.e. cummings poem and an excerpt from "Song of Myself" in our wedding on top of a mountain two summers ago.  I've included the text for both below.

 

Excerpt from

Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself
     to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture,
     not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

I know that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder,
     mullein and poke-weed.

All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
(What is less or more than a touch?)

Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

(Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,
Only what nobody denies is so.)

A minute and a drop of me settle my brain,
I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,
And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman,
And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for
     each other,
And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it
     becomes omnific,
And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.

 
 
And by good old e.e.:
the great advantage of being alive 
(instead of undying) is not so much 
that mind no more can disprove than prove 
what the heart may feel and soul may touch 
- the great (my darling) happens to be 
that love are in we, that love are in we 
 
and here is a secret they never will share 
for whom create is less than have 
or one times one than when times where- 
that we are in love, that we are in love: 
with us they've nothing times nothing to do 
(for love are in we am i are in you) 
 
this world (as timorous itsters all 
to call their cowardice quite agree) 
shall never discover our touch and feel 
- for love are in we are in love are in we: 
for you are and i am and we are (above  
and under all possible worlds) in love 
 
a billion brains may coax undeath 
from fancied fact and spaceful time -  
no heart can leap, no soul can breathe 
but by the sizeless truth of a dream 
whose sleep is the sky and the earth and the sea 
For love are in you am in i are in we

 
 
Dr. Kathryn Miles
Associate Professor and
Director of Writing
Unity College
Unity, ME 04988
207.948.3131 (ext 238)
kmiles@unity.edu

________________________________

From: asle-owner@interversity.org on behalf of Lew Kaye-Skinner
Sent: Tue 5/9/2006 12:14 PM
To: asle@interversity.org
Subject: Re: [asle] wedding material??




>At our wedding lo these many years ago, we used Isaiah
>55:10-13.  The Song of Solomon also has some great, eco-friendly
>poetry as do some of the Psalms.



Lew Kaye-Skinner, Ph.D.
Department of English
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
328 Andrews Hall
Lincoln, NE 68588-0333