‘From this day forward…’ are words intoned in every conventional marriage ceremony as two people interweave their lives with all its plans, its hopes and dreams on a love-strewn path to the future, even eternity. From here life has its own way of changing, modifying and disrupting the true course of married love for many of us.

In this volume of fifty poems our classic poets delve with storied verse into every facet of this institution. From the good, the bad and even the ugly, from the Wedding day to the realisation that divorce and separation maybe the better path. Between these two frontiers other avenues and facets are explored by the pens of many including Shakespeare, Khalil Gibran, Emily Dickinson and the Rossetti’s.

1 - 50 Shades of Marriage - An Introduction

2 - The Wedding Morning by Francis Ledwidge

3 - Marriage Morning by Alfred Lord Tennyson

4 - Epithalamion by James Elroy Flecker

5 - Wedding Day by Edith Nesbit

6 - Wedding Song by Jehudah Halevi

7 - A Bridal Song by John Ford

8 - A Bridal Toast by James Madison Bell

9 - The Bride by Laurence Hope

10 - The Bride by Rainer Maria Rilke

11 - Wedded by Isaac Rosenberg

12 - Epithalamion by Gerard Manley Hopkins

13 - To One Persuading a Lady to Marriage by Katherine Phillips

14 - A Nuptial Verse to Mistress Elizabeth Lee, Now Lady Tracy by Robert Herrick

15 - An Extract of the Wife's Will by Charlotte Bronte

16 - Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds by William Shakespeare

17 - To the Ladies by Lady Mary Chudleigh

18 - Sonnet To My Wife by Thomas Hood

19 - To a Husband by Anne Kingsmill Finch

20 - To My Dear and Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet

21 - My Delight and Your Delight by Robert Seymour Bridges

22 - Nuptial Sleep by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

23 - Invitation to Love by Paul Laurence Dunbar

24 - The Definition of Love by Andrew Marvell

25 - Fidelity by D H Lawrence

26 - Love is Not All (Sonnet XXX) by Edna St Vincent Millay

27 - The Bride by Henry Alford

28 - Bridal Birth by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

29 - On Marriage by Khalil Gibran

30 - Song of the Worker's Wife by Alice Gray Jones

31 - Song XIX. Since We Your Husband Daily See by Matthew Prior

32 - The Married Lover by Coventry Patmore

33 - The Betrothal by Edna St Vincent Millay

34 - Mutual Forebearance. Necessary to the Married State by William Cowper

35 - Vice Vearsa by Ambrose Bierce

36 - The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear

37 - June, a Tale by William Cowper

38 - Witch-Wife by Edna St Vincent Millay

39 - The Bride by Ambrose Bierce

40 - The Farmer's Bride by Charlotte Mew

41 - The Bridal Ballad by Edgar Allan Poe

42 - The Wife of Flanders by G K Chesterton

43 - A Wife in London (December 1899) by Thomas Hardy

44 - A Cry from an Indian Wife by Emily Pauline Johnson

45 - Wife to Husband by Christina Georgina Rossetti

46 - The Golden Wedding of Sterling and Sarah Lanier September the 27th 1868 by Sidney Lanier

47 - On His Deceased Wife by John Milton

48 - When We Two Parted by Lord Byron

49 - We Parted in Silence by Isabella Valancy Crawford

50 - Modern Love I by George Meredith

51 - Divorce by Anna Wickham