“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.

Ross is also the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens, (2014) with Aimee Nezhukumatathil. He co-authored, with Rosechard Wehrenberg, the chapbook, River (2014). He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin', as well as an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press.

Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. He works on The Tenderness Project with Shayla Lawson and Essence London, and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Born August 1, 1974, in Youngstown, Ohio, Gay grew up in Levittown, Pennsylvania.

He earned a bachelor of arts degree from Lafayette College and a master of fine arts degree in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. He went on to earn his doctoral degree in American Literature from Temple University and teaches at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana and at the low-residency MFA in poetry program at Drew University.

The “About” page of Gay’s website states, “Ross Gay is interested in joy. / Ross Gay wants to understand joy. / Ross Gay is curious about joy. / Ross Gay studies joy. / Something like that.”

Gay says that The Book of Delights “is about how do we attend to the ways that we make each other possible.” Of Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude, the collection in which “Wedding Poem” appears, Francine J. Harris writes, “…this gratitude, the thankfulness of this book, steeped in a grounded mindfulness, in a sincerity some might call grit, Gratitude feels like the first time you open the window in spring. That first chilly air. The sun on the sill” (Poetry Foundation, 2015).

Poem Text

Gay, Ross. “Wedding Poem.” 2015. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

“Wedding Poem” by Ross Gay is an epithalamion, or a poem created to honor and celebrate a wedding. The poem is written in formally unrhymed free verse in one continuous stanza of 40 lines. In the poem, the speaker addresses a gathering of friends. In his address, he recounts his experience of observing a bird and a sunflower in a neighborhood orchard. In the narrative, the bird hangs, wings spread, from the flower in an effort to eat the seeds. The speaker describes the scene as an intimate and rhythmic interaction between the goldfinch and the sunflower, rife with pleasure and joy. The moment is so boisterous, in fact, that the speaker can hear the commotion from a significant distance and even strains to stand on tiptoe for a better view. The speaker acknowledges the happiness he felt in this moment of witness and the realization that what he was witnessing was love.