Unique Readings

Alternatives to the normal Traditional Wedding Readings
If you’re looking to do something a little different in your ceremony, look to include wedding readings that are extremely meaningful to you, and ones that most people haven’t heard before. Here are some unique wedding readings that might be perfect for you, or at least stir your imagination!

Two Fragments
Love holds me captive again
and I tremble with bittersweet longing
As a gale on the mountainside bends the oak tree
I am rocked by my love
by Sappho

Hope Is The Thing With Feathers
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chilliest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity
It asked a crumb of me.
by Emily Dickinson

The Good-Morrow
I wonder by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved ? were we not weaned till then ?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly ?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den ?
‘Twas so ; but this, all pleasures fancies be;
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown;
Let us possess one world ; each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die
by John Donne

To a Stranger
Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you;
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking (it comes to me, as of a dream).
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you.
All is recalled as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured;
You grew up with me, were a boy with me, or a girl with me;
I ate with you, and slept with you–your body has become not yours only, nor left my body mine only;
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass–you take of my beard, breast, hands in return;
I am not to speak to you–I am to think of you when I sit alone, or wake at night alone;
I am to wait–I do not doubt I am to meet you again;
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.
by Walt Whitman

He Wishes For Cloths of Heaven
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
by W. B. Yeats