Wedding Poem

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2015

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Orchard

The word “orchard” derives from the Old English word ortgeard, the first part of which is composed of hortus, from the Latin for garden. “Orchard” most commonly refers to a planted grove of fruit trees. In “Wedding Poem,” the speaker says that “an orchard” (Line 2) in the poem is located “in my town” (Line 3). While it’s possible that the orchard sits in a rural area of town, the implication is that the speaker happens upon the orchard, a situation that seems unlikely if the orchard were off the beaten track or if the orchard belonged to the speaker.

Human sexuality and behavior has been explored through the metaphors of garden, trees, and fruit since (at least) the Book of Genesis. The orchard in “Wedding Poem” provides a sliver of paradise in the midst of a built environment. It is a window into a place and time before original sin, before the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden. In this place, joyful intercourse between living beings is not only natural, but also openly observable. One must only look to the orchard, the speaker says, to affirm and share in the presence of love in the world.

Seeds

Seeds appear late in the “Wedding Poem” but when they do, they make a dramatic entrance. Seeds are the unit or reproduction in a flowering plant, neatly packaged within a shell or husk and capable, when conditions are met, of developing into new life. “Seed” is also a term used to define male semen. The seed is what ostensibly draws the goldfinch to the sunflower—the seeds are the food for which the bird hungers. In this poem, however, the bird does not go about collecting and eating the seeds quietly and deliberately but in its pursuit, dangles and snaps. The bird swoons and swoops. It nuzzles. In its enthusiasm, the seeds, or their “tiny hulls” (Line 29), sail with abandon.

From a science perspective, seed propagation occurs when a bird consumes the seeds of a flower. The seeds then pass through the bird and are expelled with a bit of fertilizer, which helps the seeds to grow where they’re dropped. In “Wedding Poem,” the speaker adds some life—and fun—to this straightforward and rather dry description of the process. In the case of this poem, pure delight is what encourages the process of perpetuating life.

Wings

The presence of wings, while indicated with the introduction of the goldfinch—a bird—does not become fully illustrated until the bird is “steadying itself by snapping open / like an old-timey fan” (Lines 9-10). In this way, the speaker conjures an image of a fan dancer, or burlesque performer, seductively flapping a fan in a choreography of seduction. The action itself, however, is more like that of an aerial performer trying to simultaneously keep and defy balance in some complicated kama sutra position. The bird never uses its wings to fly exactly, except, perhaps, when it falls and must swoop “back to the very same perch” (Line 14).

The flower, according to the speaker, watches the “soft wind / nudging the bird’s plumage” (Lines 18-19), recalling the adage “wind beneath one’s wings,” a turn of phrase that implies the state of being lifted by another in flight.

Although wings themselves are not mentioned, at the end of the poem the speaker feels the kind of lift one might experience from having wings. He rocks “up on [his] tippy-toes” (Line 34), “just barely” (Line 35) pursing his mouth, making a kind of beak of his lips, as if poised for take-off.