A wedding is usually pictured as noise and crowds, and Emma Lazarus, the American poet best known for "The New Colossus," begins exactly there. The opening lines stack up sensations: "Music and silver chimes and sunlit air," then the scent of "honeyed orange-flower." Sound, light and smell arrive together, and the air is "freighted" with perfume as if it were a ship loaded with cargo. The guests, meanwhile, are only "Glad, friendly festal faces everywhere." The three f-sounds and the stock adjectives turn them into a cheerful blur. Nobody in the crowd is an individual, and that is deliberate, because the poem is about the two people at its center.
The bride is described in the language of enchantment. She is "rapt from all," the hour is "unearthly," she moves "as in a trance," and she fears that the "rare, subtle spell" might "dissolve." Her "cloudlike, cast-back veil" makes her almost weightless, and she is so afraid of breaking the moment that she hardly dares "to breathe, to speak." Even in a crowded church or garden she is "Alone with him." She never says a word in the poem, and her happiness seems as fragile as a soap bubble.
The form supports this. The poem is a sonnet of fourteen lines in largely iambic pentameter, rhymed ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, the pattern of the Shakespearean sonnet. The first line starts with a stressed "Mu-," which gives it a bell-like strike. The second runs a syllable over, as though the sweetness of the orange-flower spills past the line. The rhymes in the first eight lines are soft and dreamy: "air" with "everywhere," "flower" with "hour," and "trance" with "perchance," the last a pleasantly old-fashioned word that adds to the hush.
The turn comes at line nine with "But he." Up to this point we have watched the bride from outside. Now we are given the groom's point of view, and his verbs are active and watchful: he "looks down," he is "Noting," he "Doubts." The dash after "brow" marks the moment his observation becomes a worry. He sees her "misty eyes" and "grave sweet brow," and he reads them carefully. "Misty" could mean tears, and "grave" means serious, not simply joyful. He wonders whether "her bliss" is "perfect as his own." That phrase is quietly revealing, because he takes his own happiness to be perfect and measures hers against it. Calling her a "floral head" also folds her into the bouquet and the orange-blossom around her. It is tender, but it makes her something to be looked at.
The final couplet changes the vocabulary from magic to something more like accounting. He "dedicates anew with inward vow / His soul unto her service, to repay / Richly the sacrifice she yields this day." Words like "service," "repay," "Richly" and "sacrifice" belong to debts and exchanges, and they echo the earlier "freighted," with its suggestion of cargo. Marriage here is a transaction in which she gives something up and he owes her for it. The poem never says what she is surrendering. Judging by the word "yields," it is probably her earlier, independent life, but that is an inference. The rhyme of "repay" and "day" closes the sonnet with a click, like a promise being sealed.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses to be only a celebration. It takes the one silent point in a loud festival and finds seriousness there. The groom's response is admirable, since he wants to be worthy of what she gives. It is also limited, because we only ever learn what he guesses about her feelings, never what she would say. A modern reader may notice that gap, and it adds to the poem's interest. The sonnet shows a happy occasion and also lets us see what lies behind the bells, which is a vow, an unspoken loss, and one person trying to read another's face.