Your epithalamium is showing
Adam O’Riordan takes Guardian readers on a tour through epithalamia (no x-rays or invasive surgery required.) Though it sounds more like an obscure piece of anatomy you never knew existed until you embarrassingly managed to strain it while mowing the lawn, the epithalamium is “a handsome but disconcertingly formal word meaning simply a poem for a bride or bridegroom, from the Greek ‘thalamos’ or ‘wedding chamber.’”
Citing John Donne as the most well known composer of these (usually) celebratory verses, O’Riordan offers comfort to those who find the institution of marriage less universally joyful—perhaps strange, worthy of subversion, or needing an outsider’s perspective in the form of the unrequited lover.
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As to the question of why poetry and marriage are so often linked, O’Riordan makes a proposal of his own:
It strikes me that both the act of reading a poem and the act of marriage are in essence a decision to take certain words seriously – and both require a degree of faith.
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