Ceremony reading: "Bluebells for Love" by Patrick Kavanagh
Today's wedding ceremony reading is a beautiful one for couples getting married in spring, as the pretty little bluebells start to bloom.
First published in "The Bell" magazine in June 1945, Irish poet and novelist Patrick Kavanagh's gorgeous poem "Bluebells for Love" was inspired by a walk he took with his great love Hilda Moriarty in the wooded demense of Lord Dunsany's estate in Co. Meath some weeks before. It's the perfect reading for lovers of nature and Irish literature!
"Bluebells for Love" by Patrick Kavanagh
There will be bluebells growing under the big treesAnd you will be there and I will be there in May;For some other reason we both will have to delayThe evening in Dunshaughlin - to pleaseSome imagined relation,So both of us came to walk through that plantation.We will be interested in the grass,In an old bucket-hoop, in the ivy that weavesGreen incongruity among the dead leaves,We will put on surprise at carts that pass -Only sometimes looking sideways at the bluebells in thePlantation,And never frighten them with too wild an exclamation.We will be wise, we will not let them guessThat we are watching them or they will poseA mere facade like boysCaught out in virtue’s naturalness.We will not impose on the bluebells in that plantationToo much of our desire’s adulation.We will have other loves – or so they’ll think;The primroses or the ferns or the briars,Or even the rusty paling wires,Or the violets on the sunless sorrel bank.Only as an aside the bluebells in the plantationWill mean a thing to our dark contemplation.We’ll know love little by little, glance by glance.Ah, the clay under these roots is so brown!We’ll steal from Heaven while God is in the town –I caught an angel smiling in a chanceLook through the tree-trunks of the plantationAs you and I walked slowly to the station.
* This article was originally published on OneFabDay.ie.* Originally published in 2025 and updated in Feb 2026.
