Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, January 6th, 2025.

Today's poem is by Richard Wilbur, and it's called A Wedding Toast.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it

one more time. A wedding toast. St. John tells how, at Cana's wedding feast, the water pots poured

wine in such amount that by his sober count, there were a hundred gallons at the least. It made no earthly sense unless

to show how whatsoever love elects to bless brims to a sweet excess that can without depletion

overflow, which is to say that what love sees is true, that the world's fullness is not made but found. Life hungers to abound and pour

its plenty out for such as you. Now if your loves will lend an ear to mine, I toast you both,

good son and dear new daughter. May you not lack for water,

and may that water smack of Cana's wine.

The occasion for this poem is partly revealed in the text of the poem,

but there's also an epigraph to the poem that completes the picture. It reads M--C-H-C-H-W 14 July, 1971. This was a poem that presumably Wilbur composed for the

wedding of his son, Christopher, in 1971. And it takes, as its subject, the miracle, the first miracle, in fact, of Jesus in the

second chapter of John's Gospel in which he is present at a wedding. The wine runs out prematurely.

And at the request of his mother, Jesus gives some instructions about how these large jars of water are to be filled and then poured out.

And when they are poured out, lo, it is wine rather than water that is in them.

And as Wilbur says here, there are six of these containers,

these water pots, each holding 20 to 30 gallons,

John tells us.

So a good deal north of 100 gallons in total.

And as he said, such a quantity makes no earthly sense. This is a profoundly

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