Lines on the occasion of a laureate’s first words

Epithalamium
St George’s Chapel, Windsor

One day, the tissue-light through stained glass falls
on vacant stone, on gaping pews, on air
made up of nothing more than atom storms
which whiten silently, then disappear.

The next, all this is charged with brimming life.
A people-river floods those empty pews,
and music-torrents break – but then stop dead
to let two human voices make their vows:

to work – so what is true today remains the truth;
to hope – for privacy and what its secrets show;
to trust – that all the world can offer it will give;
to love – and what it has to understand to grow.

Andrew Motion

Given the difficulty, in current times, of treating a royal wedding with full pomp and predictions of permanence, Andrew Motion’s first laureate poem has two immediate virtues; it is very short, and it does not mention the couple. The reference to the place is the only thing linking this epithalamium (wedding song) with Edward and Sophie; the idea that they might “hope – for privacy” is the only concession to the celebrity of the bride and groom. Otherwise this is a cunningly conventional, restrained piece that might serve to dignify any nuptials.

Cunningly conventional, because although we have 12 lines of iambics (pentameters until the hexameters of the last stanza, with its bullet-pointed aspirations), and conventional language and image (the light pouring into an empty church, before the throngs arrive and the vows are spoken in the hush), there are trickier moments.

The rhymes are half-rhymes at best, until the closure – the perfect union – of “show” and “grow”.

The imagery of those first two stanzas when one inspects their apparently unremarkable descriptions, is actually that of the Creation; a haze of space and atoms, a void, suddenly “charged with brimming life”. At first sight, the sudden flood imagery looks like a (not wholly convincing) gesture to Hughes’s own laureateship work (“people-river” and “music-torrents”), but actually it continues the idea of earth’s creation.

The lines carry this association with earliest beginnings quite lightly. It stands up as a perfectly ordinary description of a church and a service. And then those vows.

They vow to work at their marriage (not unpointed, that, given Edward’s siblings), to hope (for privacy, enough said), to trust (the world – in various senses; quite sweetly uncertain). But then there is that last line – “[they vow] to love – and what it has to understand to grow”.

At first the grammar seems awry, the “it” jars, one feels lost. The line forces us to re-read it with “love” not as a verb, but as a noun.

The couple make their vows to Love (not unlike a toast at the reception), and to the notion that understanding and growth are intrinsic to Love, and to all the activities associated.

The punctuation doesn’t help us to read the line correctly. It militates against such a reading. But it is the only way to make the line make sense. In a short, traditional poem, that forced effort and attention are not uninteresting. All in all, this is a nicely judged offering, on a difficult brief; quietly impressive.