Advice/Help please - Suggestions for reading at a wedding

miss annie

My best pal has asked me to do a reading at her wedding which will be at St Joseph's in Highgate. This is a huge honour and I want to find something really marvellous. I have a couple of things in mind but wonder if anyone else has any suggestions? Her specifications are as follows... 'Has to be about love or some such shite and non religious'

Ilovegreyhounds

On our wedding day we were given 'Gifts of Love' a book of poems by Helen Steiner Rice including some other quotes and proverbs. Some of it is religious but not all. You are welcome to borrow it.

krappyrubsnif

When Mrs K and I were spliced we got someone to read Chapter 2 of the <a href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/Bible/Song_of_Solomon.html">Song of Solomon</a>, which despite being out of the Old Testament is not particlarly religious and managed to sound irredemiably filthy. It's rather a lovely poem.

A bit eccentric though.

Mirandola

Donne the Good Morrow or ee cummings i carry your heart?

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tharobc

A lovely love story by Edward Monkton. Always raises a smile.

http://www.itakeyou.co.uk/wedding-ideas/wedding-readings-poems/a-lovely-story.htm

Lololala

I always think The Good Morrow sounds absolutely filthy and inappropriate for church - 'suck on country pleasures' ! Love ee cummings I Carry Your Heart

Lololala

Also ee cummings 'Somewhere I have never travelled' is wonderful. Or an exert from The Book and the Brotherhood, Iris Murdoch:

I hereby give myself. I love you. You are the only being whom I can love absolutely with my complete self, with all my flesh and mind and heart. You are my mate, my perfect partner, and I am yours. You must feel this now, as I do.It was a marvel that we ever met. It is some kind of divine luck that we are together now. We must never, never part again. We are, here in this, necessary beings, like gods. As we look at each other we verify, we know, the perfection of our love, we recognize each other. Here is my life, here if need be, is my death.

Don't do that bit from Captain Corelli whatever you do. It's so cliche.

Mirandola

@Lololala

Ok, I was thinking of Good Morrow starting with 'and now good morrow to our waking souls'.

ADGS

That Iris Murdoch line, lovely as it is, does have the problem that if you know the original context it becomes a less-than-brilliant foreshadowing for a friend's marriage...

Lololala

@Mirandola Yes, that is the one. The first verse starts:

I WONDER by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved ? were we not wean'd till then ?
But suck'd on country pleasures, childishly ?

@ADGS True. Would possibly be a bad omen.

Mirandola

Sorry, I meant I'd skip the first verse

val

If your friends ahve a sense of humour, why not read Mr Casoubon's proposal to Dorothea in "Middlemarch"? Just joking!
What about the poem "Why do I love thee?"

copycara

There's a slightly fluffy poem type thing that says things like 'Today I will marry my friend...' which is non religious.

Other suggestion would be to read something a comedian or famous person may have said about marriage at some point for a lighter choice...

rainbow_carnage

A coworker is reading this at a weeding this weekend: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2001/dec/22/weekend.guybrowning>;