Looking for a reading for a renewal of vows?

Question

for reasons best known to themselves my mum and dad are renewing their vows 30 years in and have asked me to pick and then deliver a reading. having waded through a couple of websites they all seem to be about "new love" and the freshness of starting out and i'm looking for something more aligned to my parents. the fact they've grown together and are still maddeningly loved up!. Anyone literary got any thoughts to help??

Many thanks

Answer 1

How about?:

Love is not all - Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink

Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,

Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink

and rise and sink and rise and sink again.

Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath

Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

Yet many a man is making friends with death

even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,

pinned down by need and moaning for release

or nagged by want past resolution's power,

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It may well be. I do not think I would.

or:

A Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

One recognises the truth of Saint Exupery's line: Love does not consist in gazing at each other. But in looking outward together in the same direction. For in fact, man and woman are not only looking outward in the same direction, they are working outward. Here one forms ties, roots, a firm base....Here one makes oneself part of the community of men, of human society. Here the bonds of marriage are formed. For marriage, which is always spoken of as a bond, becomes actually, in this stage, many bonds, many strands, of different texture and strength, making up a web that is taut and firm. The web is fashioned of love. Yes, but many kinds of love: romantic love first, then a slow-growing devotion and, playing through these, a constantly rippling companionship. It is made of loyalties, and interdependencies, and shared experiences. It is woven of memories of meetings and conflicts; of triumphs and disappointments. It is a web of communication, a common language, and the acceptance of lack of language too, a knowledge of likes and dislikes, of habits and reactions, both physical and mental. It is a web of instincts and intuitions, and known and unknown exchanges. The web of marriage is made by propinquity, in the day to day living side by side, looking outward and working outward in the same direction. It is woven in space and in time of the substance of life itself.

Answer 2

oh dear.. my sympathies for the horrible soppiness you've had to wade through. what about a poem or something?  my mum loves Sonnet VII by Hartley Coleridge but im sure there are loads of decent ones out there. somewhere...

Answer 3

as i read your question i thought hey i just did that. so here are a few web sites that might help you with your quest

http://www.popular-wedding-songs.com/wed...

http://wedcraft.com

http://www.brilliantweddingpages.com/

try to look at some of these and if all else fails then try google and search for vowel renewal poems

hope it helps

Answer 4

How sweet! Try http://www.idotaketwo.com for vow renewal ideas.

Answer 5

Certainly check out the websites that other respondents have suggested.  The only one that springs to mind is the Elizabeth Barrett Browning one - I think it's called Sonnet from the Portuguese.

When our two souls met ...