Published 1842. It is an epithalamium; cp. The Bridesmaid (II 90), and perhaps it too dates from the marriage of T.’s brother Charles in May 1836. Alternatively, T.’s engagement to Emily Sellwood was recognized early in 1838 (CT, p. 177).
Move eastward, happy earth, and leave
Yon orange sunset waning slow:
From fringes of the faded eve,
O, happy planet, eastward go,
Till over thy dark shoulder glow
Thy silver sister-world, and rise
To glass herself in dewy eyes
That watch me from the glen below.
Ah, bear me with thee, smoothly borne,
Dip forward under starry light,
And move me to my marriage-morn,
And round again to happy night.
¶261.1. happy earth: Arthur Hallam’s Sonnet to a Lady on Her Marriage (Motter, p. 77).
2. Turner (p. 99) notes that ‘the sunset is appropriately given the colour of the bridal veil (flammeum) in Catullus’ epithalamion (lxi)’
3. Cp. On a Mourner 21, MS: ‘the fringing eve’.
6. sister-world: ‘the moon’ (T.). Perhaps hinting at Emily Sellwood, with whom Tennyson fell in love at the wedding of Charles to her sister.
9. smoothly] 1853; lightly 1842–53. Cp. Paradise Lost viii 166, where the earth, advancing from the west, ‘beares thee soft with the smooth Air along’.