Wedding Poem

“Wedding Poem” appears in the poet Ross Gay’s award-winning collection, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015). The poem is an epithalamion, a lyric poem written and performed to celebrate a marriage, often read at a wedding ceremony. “Wedding Poem” tells the story of the speaker’s encounter with a goldfinch and a sunflower. The poet uses the observation as a metaphor for partnership and romantic love. The speaker describes the bird and the flower in an act of love in which one participant gains nourishment and pleasure from the other. The moment represents an intimate joy that is public, raucous, and entirely commonplace. Such moments inspire happiness, the speaker suggests, and are readily available in everyday life, if people notice them. The poem sits in the middle of Gay’s published body of work to date, alongside other work that observes and celebrates cycles of growth in the natural world and the quotidian potential for human joy.

Poet Biography

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which (2006); Bringing the Shovel Down (2011); Be Holding (2020); and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015) which won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He is also the author of The Book of Delights (2019), a collection of essays.