A vow renewal is not quite the same as a wedding. By now, love has had time to become real. It has moved through so many ordinary days, hard seasons, repairs, laughter, disappointments, growth, change, and the quiet work of continuing to choose each other.
The best vow renewal poems and readings speak to that fuller kind of love — love that has ripened, rooted, weathered, and deepened over time. These poems and prose passages can help give language to the marriage you have actually lived, not just the one you imagined at the beginning.
Here are some poems, readings, and passages that can work beautifully for renewing your wedding vows. And if you need any support in putting together your vow renewal, reach out if you are located in Colorado, or take a look at my ceremony consulting services.
Marriage Needs Time to Ripen by Theodore Parker
“It takes years to marry completely two hearts, even the most loving and well assorted. A happy wedlock is a falling in love. Young persons think love belongs to the brow-haired and crimson cheeked. So it does for its beginning. But the golden marriage is part of love which the bridal day knows nothing of…. Such a large and sweet fruit is marriage that it needs a long summer to ripen, and then a long winter to mellow and season it.”
The Place Poem by Ted Enslin
I could open the doors and the windows
to great winds
Let everything be scattered,
like loose sheets of paper
Let tumbling take sense and proportion
from what we have put in order.
That suits us,
but it would not change anything.
You have come in,
and your entrance has been final.
You do not leave me,
nor do I leave you, beloved.
We have made this house our place,
And our shelter.
When we go out,
we will go out together.
Love is a temporary madness… by Louis de Bernières
“Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being in love, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other underground, and, when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.”
Habitation by Margaret Atwood
Marriage is not
a house or even a tent
it is before that, and colder:
the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn
the edge of the receding glacier
where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far
we are learning to make fire
To Love Is Not To Possess by James Kavanaugh
To love is not to possess,
To own or imprison,
Nor to lose one’s self in another.
Love is to join and separate,
To walk alone and together,
To find a laughing freedom
That lonely isolation does not permit.
It is finally to be able
To be who we really are
No longer clinging in childish dependency
Nor docilely living separate lives in silence,
It is to be perfectly one’s self
And perfectly joined in permanent commitment
To another–and to one’s inner self.
Love only endures when it moves like waves,
Receding and returning gently or passionately,
Or moving lovingly like the tide
In the moon’s own predictable harmony,
Because finally, despite a child’s scars
Or an adult’s deepest wounds,
They are openly free to be
Who they really are–and always secretly were,In the very core of their being
Where true and lasting love can alone abide.
A vow renewal does not need to be elaborate to be meaningful. Sometimes it just needs the right words, the right shape, and a little room for everything your marriage has held. If you’d like help creating that kind of ceremony, you can learn more about my Colorado vow renewal ceremonies or my ceremony consulting services.