Epithalamium

This poem engages in a feminist confessional reworking and adaptation of the classical Greek poetic form, the epithalamium. Epithalamia were originally poems written to celebrate the journey traversed by the bride and bridegroom to their wedding chamber, and the form endured from classical Antiquity through the Renaissance as a form of unfettered celebration of erotic love. This epithalamium inverts the traditional stance of the form, in that its speaker is not a disinterested celebrant, but rather an invested party, offering a dissonant and incisive critique of the vanity, dissemblance and foibles of the male figure who is about to marry. Consequently, this feminist reworking of the epithalamium form participates in the critical discourse about the value of marriage as an institution in the twenty-first century, and the gender roles implicit in it