Silver Wedding

What! five and twenty years have flown
    Since you were yoked together;
Your hopes, your pains, your pleasures one,
    For calm or stormy weather:
A century quartered since this match;
    Astonished, looking back, I
See he’s come thro’ without a “scratch,”
    Tho’ she has got a black eye.

And here’s their boy as large as life,
    But yesterday a baby;
And now he brings — well, not a wife,
    But something nice, that may be.
Theirs, all by love, and half by blood —
    See, Sue, for some good match meant,
She’s getting “Rich” by being sued,
    And held by an “attachment.”

In every scene, we feel their worth,
    Yet cannot quite compute it;
At work, at play, in grief or in mirth,
    She has just the knack to suit it;
At human ills, whoever tugs,
    She comes to soothe his aching —
More healing than the doctor’s drugs,
    And not a bit bad taking.

If any think the fitiest rhyme
    For wedlock must be padlock,
And that to hold them all this time,
    That “lock” must be a bad lock,
Just mark this happy pair — by age
    Still more and more united, –
Then step up to the parsonage, 
    And hand in hand get wrighted.

Well; we who wear the silver dyes,
    With dignified decorum,
Must look with gentle, pitying eyes,
    On those who never wore ‘em;
Poor things! ‘tis not their fault, you know,
    That they’re too young to marry yet,
We boys were young once, weren’t we Joe?
    And so were you, Aunt Harriet.

A clam-bake where no clams you get
    Is like a pointless fable,
A clam-bake without Harriet,
    Just fancy, if you’re able.
The village Florence Nightingale,
    The Dorcas of two churches,
Her worthy mate could only fail
    To find a better purchase.

A health to both! may joy go down
    The happy path you’re treading,
And by and by we’ll call to crown
    Your peaceful Golden Wedding.