Thursday, July 07, 2005

The Academy of American Poets - Poems for Weddings

The Academy of American Poets - Poems for Weddings

The epithalamium was employed as a literary form for the first time by Sappho, who wrote:

Raise up the roof-tree--
a wedding song!
High up, carpenters--
a wedding song!
The bridegroom is coming,
the equal of Ares,
much bigger than a big man.

It’s wedding season so go to poets.org and find some good wedding poems.  I can imagine using this in a class.  Assign different occasions to different groups and set them the task of designing a short anthology of poems with introductions to the poems.  Let’s see: weddings, funerals, births, baptisms, bar and bat mitzvahs, graduations.  Can anyone think of others?  Break ups?  I guess I could just go to the card store and check out categories.

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