All Those Endearing Young Charms: Why I Carried Sunflowers on My Wedding Day

Posted December 14, 2015 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Holidays / 7 Comments

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Today is my 2nd wedding anniversary! Last year on my anniversary, I posted about the origin of my wedding ring. Since it’s still one of my most popular posts, I decided to do another anniversary post, this time about my bouquet. Enjoy!

When I was a little girl, I didn’t have big plans for my wedding. I had no idea what kind of dress I wanted to wear or how many tiers the cake should have. In fact, I very much doubted I’d get married at all, since I wasn’t exactly the go-out-and-meet-new-people type. I was more the stay-inside-reading-all-by-myself type.

But when I was in middle school, I came across a poem (an old Irish folk song by Thomas Moore) that made me sure of one thing: the kind of flower I wanted in my wedding bouquet. The song is called “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms” and it goes a little something like this:

 

Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,
Which I gaze on so fondly to-day,
Were to change by to-morrow and fleet in my arms,
Like fairy gifts fading away,
Thou wouldst still be adored, as this moment thou art,
Let thy loveliness fade as it will;
And around the dear ruin each wish of my heart
Would entwine itself verdantly still.
It is not while beauty and youth are thine own,
And thy cheeks unprofaned by a tear,
That the fervor and faith of a soul can be known,
To which time will but make thee more dear.
No, the heart that has truly loved never forgets,
But as truly loves on to the close
As the sunflower turns on her God when he sets
The same look which she turned when he rose.

 

As a 6th grader, I hadn’t read a lot of love poems, but I’d read enough to know that they almost always fixate on the youth and beauty of the beloved. This one was different. It was about how those qualities will fade, but the lover only sees it as an opportunity to show how deep their love really goes. I realized this was what I wanted to find some day. And that’s what sunflowers came to mean for me: constancy, devotion through time

When the Mister and I decided to get married, I knew I’d found someone I was excited to get old with. I still wasn’t that worried about the dress and the cake, but now I knew why: the wedding day is just a single day. Yet, it’s the beginning of a marriage, which goes on for the whole rest of your life. Weddings aren’t about being young and beautiful. They’re about creating something that will still be there when youth and beauty are gone.

 

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Legend has it Moore wrote the song for his wife, after she contracted smallpox and locked herself away from the world, ashamed of her scars. It’s said he sang it to her outside her door, and it gave her the strength to face the world again.

 

I still have the flowers in the picture, but they’re not fresh and young anymore. My mom dried them for me, and I keep them in a mason jar on our bookcase. They’re frail and withered, and they fade a little more each year.

 

But I still love them.

 

 

7 responses to “All Those Endearing Young Charms: Why I Carried Sunflowers on My Wedding Day

  1. Awwwww! I loved this post, and I love it in general when the bride and groom deviate from typical wedding traditions or details to make the ceremony more “personalized” (for lack of a better word). And your bouquet was – still is – beautiful. So bright and vivid and full of hope. 🙂

    • Thank you! I don’t normally get sentimental in my posts, but I figure a wedding anniversary is a good excuse to bring on the feels! 🙂 I’m planning on printing all my anniversary posts and saving them for my kids, so they can know the stories behind stuff from the wedding.

  2. ladyelasa

    Awww this is so sweet! That poem is really cool. I’ve seen many of my cousins get married and though I like young love very much, I also love seeing couples who have grown old together. Seeing a couple stick together for twenty, thirty, forty or even fifty years is very inspiring.

    storitorigrace.blogspot.com

    • Thanks! When a couple I’m friends with got married, they had all the married couples come out for the first dance, and every 20 seconds the DJ would call for everyone who’d been married under a certain amount of years to sit down (1 year, 3 years, 10 years, etc.). The last couple left dancing had been married for 60 years, and the newlyweds asked them to give marriage advice. It was really neat!

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