Genevieve Taggard’s “Epithalamium” takes its title from the old Greek and Roman wedding song, but the ceremony she creates is not one of public blessing. Taggard, an American poet and left-wing activist who began publishing in the 1920s, often wrote lyrics that treat love as a natural force rather than a domestic comfort. In this poem she replaces the bridal procession with a night forest, a panther, and a listening doe. The title establishes the subject—union—while the verse turns that union into a pursuit in which desire, fear, and destruction are impossible to separate.
The poem is arranged as a chant. The opening six lines command the panther to emerge: “Out of the forest, panther, come.” The sibilance of “Silken, supple, silent, lone” gives the animal a sleek, solitary presence, and the rhyme of “night” with “delight” links darkness to pleasure immediately. That same six-line stanza closes the poem, so the piece never leaves the threshold of the forest; it is always summoning, always on the point of arrival. The middle stanzas unroll the chase itself.
In the second stanza, the panther is both hunter and hunted. A “huge and gaunt and blue” something “slips with” the animal, lashes its tail, and follows. The vague pronoun makes this second presence larger than any ordinary beast; it could be hunger, storm, or death. The panther is described as “pursued, still pursue[ing],” caught in the middle of an appetite that is itself pursued by another appetite. The sky joins the action: “Sky with thunder on its rim / Closes and closes after you.” The repeated “closes” makes the chase feel like a narrowing trap. The compressed phrasing of “Trigger loin, swinging limb” hits with a thumping stress, and the command “Go and go and go from him!” turns the line into a sprint. The sounds accelerate, but the pursuer never falls behind.
The third stanza shifts to the doe, whose lifted ears make her the poem’s alert, tender center. The rhyme of “ears” and “hears” sharpens the quiet around her, and even the vegetation seems to hold its breath: “Sway a little, creeper, creeper.” Then Taggard introduces a final hunter: “After you comes, more gaunt than you / And lean for prey, and quick, the leaper.” The words “gaunt,” “lean,” and “quick” strip the predator down to pure need. The stanza closes with the poem’s most unsettling line: “And the little doe will sleep with the sleeper.” In an epithalamium, “sleep with” can mean sexual union, but the phrase also means death. The “sleeper” may be the hunter or the grave itself. Both readings remain alive.
The repeated refrain returns with its soft and hard textures: “Under bloom, and over stone.” That single line places flowers and rock in the same path, as if the panther’s beauty and danger move through the same landscape. The word “delight” now carries a predatory edge, since the poem has shown what delight costs. The panther is “drooped with night,” almost indistinguishable from darkness, yet the speaker calls it out with a welcome.
The significance of Taggard’s poem lies in its refusal to make a wedding song safe. She borrows the ancient epithalamium and strips away the social blessing, revealing the older, wilder logic underneath: union as a hunt, one creature’s desire fulfilled at another’s expense. The panther remains beautiful, the doe remains tender, and the poem refuses to resolve the two. Instead, it chants the moment before the catch, again and again.