Contributor’s Marginalia: Matthew Roth responding to Therese Gleason’s “Elegy for a Wedding Processional”

When we think about time, we think about what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen. Past, present, and future line up for our inspection, stretching out in both directions as far as the eye can see, pretending to be not time but space. Our conscious perception of time is messier—a blend of memory, imagination, and sudden lived experience that resists our desire for order. It is here, in the fluid realm of perception, that the speaker in Therese Gleason’s “Elegy for a Wedding Procession” finds herself.

The title of the poem presents an immediate irony while preparing the literal ground where the poem’s ceremony will take place. What does it mean that an elegy has replaced the expected epithalamium? Already we know that something is amiss, that the rites of death and love have somehow come together here. In time we will come to understand the reason: a bride is getting married in the very church where, “three months before,” the bride’s father’s funeral took place. But the past won’t stay past.

Had the title not put us on alert, we might imagine the shaking bride of the poem’s first line to be experiencing a simple case of wedding nerves, a brief anapestic ripple of excitement before the settling iambic rhythm of the processional kicks in. Line four provides the first clue as to what has happened: her mother is walking her down the aisle, rather than her father. As for the bride, she wears an “off-white gown.” She’s past pretending. She likewise wears an “organza shroud,” which of course is the wrong word. The shawl or wrap has been replaced with a funeral shroud, as if a kind of Stygian dampness has seeped up through the floor, soaking the wedding ceremony in funereal imagery. The first sentence as a whole creates a disorienting sensation of altered familiarity, made all the more overwhelming by the string of prepositions (in, when, down, on, in, with) which seem to drive the bride forward before she has a chance to calm herself.

As the processional commences, the poem shifts to a concessional mode with a series of negations (“no veil,” “no virgin / unscathed,” “no stranger”) that reveal the bride to be a woman of experience. She’s had sex. She’s buried a parent. As readers, we admire her candor and perseverance even as we register an undertone of vulnerability deriving from that succession of disavowals (on a day, after all, of vows).

The “passage” the speaker and her mother are walking is of course both literal and figurative. It’s the center aisle of the church but it is also the second rite of passage they’ve endured in just three months, and the rites are out of order; the marriage should have come first. But now the memory of the funeral overwhelms the present scene, the wedding attire replaced with mourning clothes—a change marked in the rhythm of the poem by a sudden shift out of the rising rhythms of the previous lines into a falling rhythm and the sharp rhyme of “clad in black.”

That falling rhythm becomes the dominant rhythmic mode in the poem’s second half, as the full interpenetration of wedding and funeral is achieved: “On I stepped / clutching my mother’s elbow / into the shadow of death.” Here irony abounds. The bride approaches her betrothal even as she reenacts her father’s funeral ceremony. The “shadow of death” comes from the 23rd Psalm’s “valley of the shadow of death,” a prayer for peace in the face of danger and despair, but the dactylic rhythms here also bring to mind the doom of Tennyson’s “Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred.”

The next images provide a study in contrasts. The mother is “a column of stone / in lavender satin”—a darkly comic image that nevertheless highlights her status as both widow and mother-of-the-bride. For her part, the bride is “a reed swaying,” a slight improvement, perhaps, from the shaking of the first line but still not like herself, not like her mother, a thing without agency, moved by the wind.

The organic image of the reed associatively connects to the poem’s final image, the bridal bouquet, which like the previous images is a mixture of textures reflecting the complicated nature of the day:

My thorned bouquet
pale purple
spiked
with White Virginia
same as his casket spray

Like everything else, the bouquet comprehends both pain and beauty, sharpness and softness. The music of the first phrase is interrupted by the explosive, strongly stressed “pale purple / spikes” and the name of the flower echoes ironically the “off-white” wedding dress and the bride’s declaration that she is “no virgin.” In a sense, we are prepared for the last line, but it still somehow manages to shock, as the bride reaches the front of the church and finds her bouquet not in her hands but adorning the casket of her dead father. The shock is amplified by the rhyme of “bouquet” and “spray,” as well as by the realization that the masculine pronoun is the poem’s first mention of the father, whose presence has until this moment come only via his absence.

The effect is devastating, more than justifying the poem’s status as elegy. It is more profound still when we realize another absence in the poem: the groom (assuming for the moment that this is a heterosexual marriage). Presumably, he has been waiting for his bride to join him at the altar, but the poem, filtered through the bride’s grief, cannot acknowledge him. He is a replacement for the father. He is the future. The bride, we’re sure, wants to see him up there but the whole poem is saying “not yet.”