Must haves for weddings

I don’t seem to go to a lot of weddings these days, but I was interested to read (in a recent piece by Ruth Graham on the Poetry Foundation website) what happens at nuptials in America. Ruth writes:

The aesthetics of such a wedding [hers], at least for couples of a certain age and posture, are practically set in stone: indie pop music, mason jars, white Christmas lights, wildflowers. And poetry. The practice of including a poem in a wedding ceremony is so widespread and mainstream… But which poems to choose?... Googling brought up near-identical lists of suggested readings (Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Wedding Prayer”, Frost’s “The Master Speed”).

Not just pop, but indie. Not just jars, but mason ones. Not just Christmas lights, but white ones. Not just flowers, but wild ones.

And the Stevenson poem? I certainly hadn’t realised that he had written a “wedding ” poem. Well, he didn’t. It’s the first stanza of a lovely prayer he wrote while living in Samoa, where the family had prayers every evening. It’s not really connected with weddings at all, in fact it’s called “For Success”:

Lord, behold our family here assembled.
We thank Thee for this place in which we dwell;
for the love that unites us;
for the peace accorded us this day;
for the hope with which we expect the morrow;
for the health, the work, the food,
and the bright skies, that make our lives delightful;
and for our friends in all parts of the earth,

            and our friendly helpers in this foreign isle.  

Of course, at American weddings, the last line is usually omitted.

I wonder what are the current “must haves” at British (and other) weddings?

On receiving a dedication

The Scottish novelist SR Crockett sent a copy of his newly-published set of short stories, The Stickit Minister, to Robert Louis Stevenson, who was by this time living in Samoa, with the inscription:

To Robert Louis Stevenson of Scotland and Samoa I dedicate these stories of that Grey Galloway land where about the Graves of the Martyrs the Whaups are crying – his heart remembers how.

Deeply moved, the homesick Stevenson wrote this poem, which he sent to Crockett:

To S. R. Crockett
On receiving a dedication

Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying,

Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,
Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,
My heart remembers how!

Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places,
Standing-stones on the vacant wine-red moor,
Hills of sheep, and the howes of the silent vanished races,
And winds, austere and pure.

Be it granted me to behold you again in dying,
Hills of home! and to hear again the call;
Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying,
And hear no more at all.

Of course, he never did behold again the hills of home. He died in Samoa, which he also loved, in 1894.

Above: Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson by GP Nerli, Samoa,1892, Scottish National Portrait Gallery

Robert Louis Stevenson and Count Nerli and Ernest Mehew

I had always thought of myself as a writer. But in truth all I had ever done in practice was to write some articles on marketing communications and innovation.

So, when we visited Samoa in pursuit of Robert Louis Stevenson in the mid-1990s, I was standing in the large main room of the house he built there, Vailima, when he appeared over my shoulder.

“This book you’ve been talking about,” he said, “how far have you got with it?”

“Well, to be honest,” I replied, “I haven’t started it”

“But you’ve been talking about it for a long time. Maybe you think it’s not worth doing?”

“No, I do think it’s worth doing.”

“Do you think someone else will write it?” he asked.

“No, if I don’t do it, I don’t think it will ever be done.”

“Well perhaps you’d better get started.”

At the height of his fame, author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and much else, Stevenson had died in that house in December 1894 aged just forty-four.

That evening, we retired to Aggie Grey’s Hotel in Apia. I got out a blank sheet of paper and started on the book which I’d been researching and thinking about over several years. It was published some eighteen months later as Robert Louis Stevenson and Count Nerli in Samoa: The Story of a Portrait.

I was cheeky enough to send an early draft to the leading Stevenson scholar in the world, Ernest Mehew. He thought it a worthwhile project and gave me several pages of handwritten notes containing suggestions of all kinds.

Dear Ernest died four weeks ago (on 24 October 2011) at the age of eighty-eight. RIP.

[Above, Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson by GP Nerli, painted in Samoa in 1892, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh.]

Quoting Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson’s life is as fascinating as his books. Born in Edinburgh in 1850. Died in Samoa in 1894. Author of Treasure Island, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped and much besides.

I wrote a book about some portraits of him fifteen years ago. (Above, RLS painted by GP Nerli in Samoa in 1892, Scottish National Portrait Gallery.)

And he’s vividly quotable. Here are a few examples:

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

“Man is not truly one, but truly two.”

“If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.”

“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”

“Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. “

“There are no foreign lands. It is only the traveller who is foreign.”

“An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.”

“Wealth is only useful for two things: a yacht and a string quartette.”

“You cannot run away from a weakness; you must sometimes fight it out or perish. And if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?”

“Every one lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it.”
“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.”

Do you have a particular favourite?