Foreword l~,cts get asked so often by their friends and relatives to suggest appropriate readings ior marriages that they come to be more aware than most people arc ~4 what a wedding is: a tbast tot the saying ot a magic spell. A spell to call ~lovn t~) earth what we }rove sensed as divine love and to toss earthly h~c like ribbons on the wind--into ctcrnity, and to make that moment, its h()pes ;t m l its bright intentions, hold through all the difficulties ota com- Inon lifE:. This magic is to be Jccomplished in a public ceremony so that the par- a binding: l, some person, take you, some person, for my . . . And poets, with their heads full of oht poems, hearing these words, are likely to hear also in the hack of their minds ,m echo of some of the ohtest tn,lgical la ngtt:tge, the <)h h st scr:q)s of poetry, on earth, when there was not much distinction between poetry and religious utterance, not much dis- traction between a prayer for good crops, [)~r a friendly relation to the soil or the !i,rcst that t;:cds us, and a prayer for a young couple. At the begin ning, tt~c one w~/s probably thought, m the way of all sympathetic magic, to ch pc-nd on the other: w)u prayed |-or the marriage to be blessed as you prayed f{)r the t)cople tt)bc blessed, as you prayed f})r thc sun in its timc and tl~. rain in its time, as you prayed to the spMts of the animals you hunted, :m~l u~ the hmdamcntal magic of the green earth that relle~a, s itself and to the day and the year that renew themselves, and you praycd tor this magic to be in the lovers and it in them. That ohl cry in the earliest (;reek and l.atin pout ry rcmembcrcd this history, and it was also a cry of spontaneous U,v, a call to the least: 0 flvmenaec fJymen () l tFy}lc,,1H~]metlclt:C
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