Revelation - a poem on marriage

 

The Veiled Lady at Mia, Raffaelle Monti

Reciting vows through veil of tulle,
I behind and you before,
We speak according to the rule
And Love makes rote words something more.

We are pronounced, presented new,
You lift the veil and bend to kiss;
We did not know - but now we do -
That marriage is summed up in this:

A daily lifting of the veil,
A daily choice to let it lift;
Allowing masks to fall and fail
And letting light refine and sift.

Revealed and seen in sharp detail, 
This is the pain, and this the gift:
To know, be known, and not to quail
 - Love is an apocalypse.

I know what we usually think when we hear “apocalypse” - a catastrophe or a cataclysmic 
event. No, I am not making a comment on my 22 years of marriage to my husband. Pinky
promise. I am on trying to describe the work of marriage on the soul:

ἀποκάλυψις 
apokalupsis: Revelation, unveiling, disclosure
From apokalupto; disclosure -- appearing, coming, lighten, manifestation, be revealed, revelation.

I did have both the biblical Greek meaning of revelation and the modern meaning of a 
cataclysmic end are in view when I wrote this. There is a sense in which "a large scale and 
violent event happens" in the soul of each person when they get married. They are no 
longer their own. A very real end of a period of life happens in marriage, and even if they 
eventually part ways through divorce or death, they will never again be what they were. 
They are changed forever.

But every end of an age signals the beginning of a new. It reminds me of Tolkien’s 
“eucatastrophe".” I don’t think it is a stretch to say marriage is a kind of eucatastrophe:

"I coined the word 'eucatastrophe': the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with 
a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy stories to produce). And 
I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of 
truth.... It percieves-- if the story has literary 'truth'...--that this is indeed how things really do 
work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the 
Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe' possible in the greatest fairy story-- and 
produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively 
so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, 
reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love..."
--Letter 89