Latin form "epithalamium"
A poem written to celebrate a marriage.
Among its classical practitioners were the Greeks Sappho and Theocritus and the Romans Ovid and Catullus.
The term in Greek means "at the bridal chamber," since the verses were originally written to be sung
outside the bedroom of a newly married couple.
The form flourished among
the Neo-Latin poets of the Renaissance, who established the model that was followed by writers in the European vernacular languages.
Sir Philip Sidney wrote the first English instance in about 1580, and fifteen years later Edmund Spenser wrote his great lyric "Epithalamion," a celebration of his own marriage that he composed as a wedding gift to his bride.
John Donne, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, and many other Renaissance poets composed wedding poems that were solemn or ribald, according to the intended audience and the poet's own temperament.
Sir John Suckling's "A Ballad upon a Wedding" is a good-humored parody of this upper-class poetic form, which he applies to a lower-class wedding.
Shelley composed an "Epithalamium"; Tennyson's In Memoriam, although it opens with a funeral, closes with an epithalamion.
A. E. Housman spoke in the antique idiom of the bridal song in "He Is Here, Urania's Son"
W. H. Auden wrote an "Epithalamion" in 1939.
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