Personalise your ceremony with wedding readings

Readings are a lovely way to personalise your wedding and you can use them in both religious and civil wedding ceremonies. You can find great wedding readings about love, marriage and romance. You can even opt for comical readings. Here are a few options for significant wedding readings:

Wedding readings – literary readings

For a literary reading you can simply pick a passage from any book that has meaning to you and your fiancé. For instance:

• The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams has a part that describes how love makes you real.
• Gift From The Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, has a beautiful extract about the changing nature of love.

Alternatively Shakespearian readings are still very fashionable for wedding ceremonies. Some of the most popular ones include:

• Sonnet 116 which comes with the familiar phrase ‘love is not love which alters when it alterations finds, or bends with the remover to remove.’
• Sonnet 18, which starts ‘Shall I compare thee to a summers day?’

Wedding readings – romantic poems

Spoil yourself and spend a weekend reading different love poems with your fiancé, but keep the tissues at hand to mop up those tears. There are a number of poems about love, romance, and marriage, that you will almost have too many to choose from.

A few popular wedding poems:

• My Luve, by Robert Burns
• Sonnets from the Portuguese, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, especially the one which begins ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.’
• She walks in beauty, by Lord Byron
• To be one with each other, by George Eliot.

For a truly unique and intimate touch to your ceremony, why not write a poem of your own? Perhaps you have a friend or relative who is good at writing, and could come up with a really unique reading for your wedding if you aren’t confident about your own writing skills.

Wedding readings – religious readings

For a romantic bible reading, you may wish to keep in mind the Corinthians 13:1-13, which is a reading about love. It ends with the famous phrase ‘And now those three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.’ Alternatively consider some of the classic biblical readings that are especially relevant to marriage. A famous choice is Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 which is perfect for a wedding ceremony since it talks about how two people are stronger than one.

Wedding readings – humorous readings

There are a number of humorous or light-hearted poems and reading you could consider to keep your ceremony fun and quirky. If you have a friend or family member to do a reading, they might be more comfortable with an informal poem than a serious passage about love. Two of these are:

• Recipe for Love, by Anonymous which starts ‘Put the love, good looks and sweet temper into a well furnished house,’ and ends ‘and bake gently for ever.’
• Blessing for a marriage, by James Dillet Freeman