So you’re getting married. OTG* that’s wonderful! (*Oh Their God) Only, the date approaches and you still don’t know what to do about the readings. You’re just hoping your celebrants look enough like a minister and a rabbi that your parents never notice that they don’t mention God. But what should they mention?
Marriage is a pretty big commitment to take on with reason alone, and some bold romantic thoughts can help a lot. My book The Wonder Paradox: Awe, Poetry, and the Meaningful Life takes a close look at a couple of favorite wedding poems today, including the mega popular E. E. Cummings poem, “i carry your heart with me(I carry it in”. A poem with a bit of context can mean a lot more for the guests but also understanding the poem well can give something real to the bride and groom.
A poem this wildly popular at weddings is cultural liturgy. A friend told me his wedding cake had the poem written concentrically around it, traveling down the tiers. It isn’t an easy poem, but it’s beautiful even before you spend a lot of time with it and find an understanding. Here it is.
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
The poem opens and closes with a heart inside a heart. With the lost Biblical image of unity in love that Adam’s rib once provided, Cummings gives us instead two hearts occupying one space. The words are at once care-taking (I’m carrying you for your sake) and talismanic (I’m carrying you for my sake). Love here is even deeper inside the body than ribs, in that tenacious thumping muscle they cage.
The interior of the poem is a brightly frenetic report on this amazing cardiac fusion. Fear is flagged in the tiny, set-off line, “i fear”. A hint of fear in a wedding poem can be a safety valve against the smile pressure of scheduled joy.
The poem’s multiple parentheses feel like ever-greater confidences. There in the plant world’s sexless striving, we find the hunger of human root and human bud.
How can we exceed our own very real limits and love’s quite famous limitations? The answer is that the “tree called life” grows and carries us higher. The poem’s final, “i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)” seals us up, like Adam, shy one rib and ready for love.
Cummings was inspired by the “Imagism” of American poets Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound, a clean descriptive style inspired in part by Chinese poetry. Also, after a trip to France, he was influenced by Surrealism. For all that is new in his free use of language, the poem is essentially in the shape of a sonnet, and is Romantic about love and nature.
The poem is also read at funerals, where lines that we read as complex romantic love at a wedding, now become rather simple, poignant images of love in grief.
Perhaps most important is what the poem has for us when we ask it about our own life and death. The universe churned for billions of years and here and there produces love, its greatest achievement. We’re too tired to climb anymore, so we think we are sunk, we’ll never get to the rooftop where our love lies waiting, looking at the stars, and we weep and sleep, and the tree grows so we rise anyway. It’s not a solution that ever crossed our minds and yet it is what happens.
We step off the branch and onto the roof and romance has a new arc, and the shark of love keeps swimming and you don’t have to hang on, you’re the terrifying fin. All you have to do is notice how lucky you have been. You don’t get to say, “There is no meaning,” because you are part of the meaning but not the brains. Nor the spine. Nor the stomach. Nor the spleen. All you can say is that you have been creating the real with your love this whole time and as for more, you are a fin. Is the shark love? Is the ocean love? Let’s just back away from the metaphor and regroup on dry land.
What I mean is that we seem to be little nothings barely as stable as a lit paper match but really we are love monsters producing the real with our longing. The day doesn’t need to be stuffed with anything right now, the day is an elephant, already stuffed with elephant, no need for any help from you, you ride.
Oh yeah, I was supposed to be talking about weddings but I’d rather just lie down by a river bank with all the other atheist brides and let the wind take our veils while we talk about life. We have to lie down because our dresses are so tight.
We like to talk about the meaning of life because only when we really get into it does the whole thing come off as super funny, more than anything else, only then does the terrible anxiety lift, after the love is finally accepted, finally understood, really funny and good. Okay, I gotta go. The atheist brides are getting hungry and sleepy and I should get them home.
That’s me for this lovely Wednesday. I hope you are in love or just really moved by the susurration of the breezes in the leaves. If it’s bad in summer, that’s rough, but it too will pass. You don’t realize what a superstar you are. Okay, don’t kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.
love,
Jennifer