Wedding smiles are summer flowers,
Common sweets we lightly hold;
Wedding tears are April showers,
Swelling germs of richer mould.
Feelings finest, joys divinest,
Strike down deepest toward the sources
Of the forces
That drive all things on their courses.
Bliss, the pale Nymphæa, uprears
A white glory to the sun,
With its dark root bathed in tears,
Blooming brighter, sweeter, whiter,
For that humid benison.
Oh, the fairest and the rarest
Of the round year’s golden boons
Are no solstice fires nor noons,
With their tropic heats and treasons,
But the soft, commingled seasons
‘Twixt the glad and sombre moons:
Mays that mellow into Junes
From harsh Aprils; warm Septembers,
When the red-ripe year remembers
All its glory, touched with sober
Prescience of a grand October!
Oh, the hours when white day kisses
Her dark sister, coming, going,
All her face with love’s light glowing,
Fill our hearts with tenderest blisses.
And surcease of all affliction.
Angels silently descending
Through the open heavens seem bending
Rosy palms of benediction
On our foreheads!
Not the high lights,
But the twilights, morn and even,
Open deepest into heaven
Tears that greet a speechless blessing
Are as dews to opening roses;
Words are weak, but love uncloses
Her rich heart to their caressing.
Laughter is the fountain’s plashing,
Sparkle of the sunlight flashing
On the wrinkled pool below;
But refreshing life is daughter
Of the water
In its shadowy underflow;
All the green that hides betrays it,
And the tenderest flower, to praise it,
Rocks her censer to and fro.
What if tears, then, rise unbidden
In our joy, or scarcely hidden,
Make the veiling smile more mellow?
Pensive thought is love’s yoke-fellow,
And love’s rarest blooms unfold
In the eve’s or morning’s gold,
With the dews such hours diffuse
Gathered in each petal’s fold.
George Shepard Burleigh
Wedding Tears