In Tea and Sympathy, the English Café in New York’s West Village, all talk is of the Royal Wedding. Nightly the networks show montages of London - cleaner, brighter, Americanized on camera - and the grinning anchors seconded to the capital for the duration. There is something surreal about seeing Barbara Walters standing in Westminster Abbey and not sitting next to Whoopi Goldberg on the sofa of The View (a morning chat show - the smarter, classier sister of our own ‘Loose Women’).

From Sappho onwards poets have been called on to pen verse in honour of the bride and groom or ‘Epithalmia’ as they’re sometimes known. Should the Wales’ wish there is a rich tradition to choose from on the sceptred isle; John Donne, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson all tried their hand. And the form is alive and well. Scottish poet Roddy Lumsden’s ‘On A Promise’ is a fine example. While Welsh poet Dannie Abse’s touching ‘Epithalmion’ might be the ideal choice: ’Come then all you wedding guests: 
green ghost of trees, gold of barley, 
you blackbird priests in the field…
come the living and come the dead’ he asks.

However, if you’re already sick to death of all things wedding and royal, I would direct you to W.B. Yeats’ ‘The Collar Bone of a Hare’, an ideal corrective. ’Would I could cast a sail on the water/ Where many a king has gone /And many a king's daughter’ Yeats announces as the poem opens, before going on to offer an entrancing vision of the ‘comely trees and the lawn’ where he can ‘change my loves while dancing /
And pay but a kiss for a kiss’ as he looks back at ‘the old bitter world where they marry in churches / Through the white thin bone of a hare’.

My own favourite wedding poem is not really a wedding poem at all, at least not in the strictest sense. Written by Sir Thomas Wyatt ‘Whoso List To Hunt’ records his frustrated love of Henry the VIII’s wife Anne Bolyn. ‘Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,’ he tells us, adding sorrowfully ‘But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
 The vain travail hath wearied me so sore, 
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.’ I can’t help but think of the unrequited and former lovers sitting in Westminster Abbey for who Wyatt’s poem might be particularly apt.

As the inescapable nuptials loom it seems right to give the last word to that courtier par excellence Sir Philip Sydney. Subject or citizen there is something to be said for the certainty and simplicity of Sydney’s poem ‘The Bargain’ :

‘My true love hath my heart, and I have his, 

By just exchange one for another given: 

I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss, 

There never was a better bargain driven.’

Adam O'Riordan has selected and introduced the poems in When Love Speaks: Poetry and prose for weddings, relationships and married life and is also the author of the collection of poetry In the Flesh