I came across this poem - a new Christmas offering from Carol Ann Duffy - the other day in The Times. The Mistletoe Bride is a sort of urban myth which tells the tragic story of a young bride who went missing while playing a traditional wedding game of hide and seek at her December wedding and was found years later, dead, trapped in an old trunk she had hid in, with a sprig of mistletoe in her hand.
Creepy.
Even though the story (and the poem) is haunting, I love the connotations of the last lines referring to the mistletoe: 'like love, patiently green'. Is love something which lasts forever, evergreen, never withering? So patient, it will wait beyond death? (And I just can't help taking the moral of 'don't hide from love' from the story! Not to mention playing games...)
The Mistletoe Bride - Carol Ann Duffy
The December bride who, bored with dancing, skipped from the castle hall to play hide-and-seek, a white bird flickering into the dark...
The groom, who searched each room, calling her name; then the bridal guests, flame-lit, checking the grounds...
The fifty Christmases till a carpenter jemmied an old oak chest; the skeleton with its unstrung pearls, loose emeralds, its rings of diamond, sapphire, gold...
The running feet, the shouting for others to see what he’d seen; mistletoe in the loose bones of a hand...
like love, patiently green.
Let us make your wedding exclusive. Mistletoe is a symbol of comfort, sterility, really like and, well, the hug. Seems to be like weddings Mistletoe to us! How can we provide the most perfect mistletoe to beauty your wedding and bring additional pleasure and fun to all? Below are a few ideas others have requested for in the last. If you have a exclusive idea, let us know and we'll see what we can do.
ReplyDeleteI love it, in so few words it captures a feeling of a macabre Christmas day.
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