Dear reader,

I got married last week. I meant to schedule something in advance, to hold the line while I knew I’d be busy, but I didn’t. So I missed a week. Last Tuesday was the first time since launch that you did not receive a Common Measure in your inbox.

However, the fact that I regret this lapse encourages me. We went a full 15 weeks without a single break. It was not always easy to get the newsletter off the press on Tuesday mornings, after inevitably busy Mondays at work, but it always happened.

What has kept me sending is definitely the responses I receive to the weekly emails. You have been commenting on the posts and emailing me such unreasonably thoughtful replies; I am stunned that you have taken so much care to engage with the material. You could be reading anything this morning, but you’re reading this.

I hope that the newsletters spark some thought, poetic or not, and help you with your day. I have some big plans for the newsletter going forward; I can’t wait to share them with you soon.

This week, in the meantime, I’d like to do something different. At my wedding ceremony, a few of my family members graciously read poems. My cousin Alex read Sonnet 116, my aunt (in-law) Pam read Prayer for a Marriage by Steve Scafidi, and my stepdad Alan read Marriage Morning by Tennyson. I tried to get someone to read Epithalamion by Edmund Spenser but the commissioner said we didn’t have an extra 45 minutes for iambic pentameter.

Today, I am writing to share the Tennyson. I hope you’ll enjoy hearing a voice other than mine. I love this poem, and I love Tennyson. One interesting biographical lagniappe: my elementary school, and that of four of the five groomsmen, was Lord Tennyson Elementary!

Marriage Morning
BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Light, so low upon earth,
   You send a flash to the sun.
Here is the golden close of love,
   All my wooing is done.
Oh, all the woods and the meadows,
   Woods, where we hid from the wet,
Stiles where we stayed to be kind,
   Meadows in which we met!
Light, so low in the vale
   You flash and lighten afar,
For this is the golden morning of love,
   And you are his morning star.
Flash, I am coming, I come,
   By meadow and stile and wood,
Oh, lighten into my eyes and my heart,
   Into my heart and my blood!
Heart, are you great enough
   For a love that never tires?
O heart, are you great enough for love?
   I have heard of thorns and briers.
Over the thorns and briers,
   Over the meadows and stiles,
Over the world to the end of it
   Flash of a million miles.

Text taken from Poetry Foundation