An embarrassing poem for Chelsea Clinton's wedding
An embarrassing poem for Chelsea Clinton's wedding - Telegraph
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Poor Chelsea Clinton, at last escaping from her parents to the happy hunting ground of marriage, only to have her choice of wedding poem mocked. There's nothing wrong with The Life that I have. It is romantic, incantatory and, above all, short.
Its popularity undoubtedly stems from its inclusion in the film Carve Her Name With Pride (1958), even if Miss Clinton, now Mrs Mezvinsky, has never seen it. For the purposes of a wedding, the associated ideas of resistance, torture and death at an early age may be disregarded.
The last rites of Beryl BainbridgeTrue, it is really about death, but so are all the best love poems. The ratio of death to love is actually higher than one funeral to four weddings. Thus Larkin's touching celebration of the married love he never attained, "An Arundel Tomb", ends with the grudging: "Our almost-instinct almost true:/ What will survive of us is love."
It must be faced that epitaphs are generally more memorable than epithalamia. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who did at least manage to get married, ends her well known verses, "How do I love thee?/ Let me count the ways," with the thought: "I shall but love thee better after death." Unlike the fall of the rupee, this line is difficult to omit, since that would wreck the rhyme scheme.
In any case, poems that begin promisingly enough for any weddings have a provoking way of going off on their own bittersweet way. What better text for a wedding than Betjeman's "Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another–/ Let us hold hands and look"? The trouble is the succeeding couplet: "She such a very ordinary little woman;/ He such a thumping crook."
That might serve for an ironic English country wedding, where laughter is on the order of service. But a tendency of Chelsea's compatriots is to seek wisdom in a book of quotations. In Britain, dictionaries of quotations contain famous words by famous people. In America, they contain suitable sentiments by unknown authors, for weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs. The great fallacy is to suppose that, because great poetry is often written by people of whom you have never heard, then poetry by people of whom you have never heard is great.
Books full of quotes have been supplanted by the web. "Beautiful wedding poetry can create an awesome loving impression," boasts one website holding out straws to fiancées drowning in desperation for a suitable poem for the Big Day. It offers several examples by Nicholas Gordon.
Now, I have nothing against Mr Gordon, and have not previously read his poetry (unless perhaps on a birthday card). In one of those recommended, he asks what "identifies" a husband or a wife. Good question. His answer is a little alarming. "Sometimes there's the terror of/ The searing pain of grief,/ As if the loss of love were death:/ Sheer scream without relief."
In this ideal wedding number, Mr Gordon, author of more than 2,000 poems (Easter poems, Columbus Day poems, poems about drunk driving, poems on child abuse) uses the metre of Lewis Carroll's poem The Mad Gardener's Song, which begins "He thought he saw an Elephant/ That practised on a fife:/ He looked again, and found it was/A letter from his wife/ 'At length I realise,' he said,/ 'The bitterness of Life!'." Given the choice at my wedding, I think I'd prefer the Lewis Carroll.
Usually, though, the accepted genre for weddings and funerals is not the birthday-card school, but the tea-towel variety of verse or prose. I mean such plangent items as the fake olden-days' "Desiderata", the snippet from Donne about "one equal music", or Jenny Joseph's poem about that annoying old woman who will wear purple. The great thing is that they are familiar and sound good. It beats a Shakespeare sonnet, which, even if comprehensible, might well turn out to be unsuitably indecent.
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Dictionaries of quotations are pretty rare in France, but someone I know managed to find one in version française and suggested it when a French friend had to give a wedding speech. They looked up the topic of marriage, and the first entry that came up was something about many good marriages having begun as rape.
Personally I kind of liked it, but I wasn't in the majority.
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