Edgar Allan Poe

Bridal Ballad

BRIDAL BALLAD.
The ring is on my hand,
And the wreath is on my brow;
Satins and jewels grand
Are all at my command,
And I am happy now.
And my lord he loves me well;
But, when first he breathed his vow
I felt my bosom swell—

Wedding knell

A knell is a funeral bell. Her wedding vows sound like a death toll—the first sign this marriage is haunted.

For the words rang as a knell,
And the voice seemed his who fell

Voice confusion

She hears her dead lover's voice speaking through her new husband. The past is bleeding into the present.

In the battle down the dell,
And who is happy now.
But he spoke to re-assure me,
And he kissed my pallid brow
While a reverie came o'er me,
And to the church-yard bore me,
And I sighed to him before me,

D'Elormie

French-sounding name suggests nobility or romance. She's so dissociated she mistakes her living husband for her dead lover at the altar.

Thinking him dead D'Elormie,
"Oh, I am happy now!"
And thus the words were spoken,
And this the plighted vow,
And, though my faith be broken,

Broken faith

Double meaning: she broke her promise to her dead lover AND her wedding vows are spiritually broken from the start.

And, though my heart be broken

The golden token

The wedding ring becomes evidence in her self-prosecution—proof she's committed to the wrong man.

Behold the golden token
That proves me happy now!
Would God I could awaken!
For I dream I know not now,
And my soul is sorely shaken
Lest an evil step be taken,—
Lest the dead who is forsaken

Forsaken dead

Final reversal: she worries not about her own happiness but whether she's damned her first love by marrying another.

May not be happy now.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Refrain's Lie

"I am happy now" appears six times, and it's false every time. This is Poe's technique of obsessive repetition—the more the speaker insists, the more we hear her denial. The phrase shifts meaning with each use: first it's a bride's expected declaration, then it becomes desperate self-persuasion, then it's spoken *to a dead man*, and finally it appears as something she wants to believe but can't.

Poe wrote this around 1837-1849, during his marriage to his teenage cousin Virginia Clemm. The poem's anxiety about marrying the wrong person while haunted by a lost love reflects the Gothic tradition's obsession with romantic loyalty beyond death. The bride isn't mourning her dead lover—she's guilty about betraying him.

The meter reinforces the trap: short, tight lines (mostly trimeter) with heavy rhyming create a music-box effect. The poem sounds pretty and mechanical, like the bride going through socially required motions while emotionally somewhere else. Notice how "now" anchors nearly every stanza—she's stuck in a present moment she can't accept.

Dissociation at the Altar

The poem's central event happens in stanza 3: during her wedding vows, the bride has a dissociative episode. > "While a reverie came o'er me, / And to the church-yard bore me"—she's physically at the altar but mentally in the graveyard with D'Elormie. She speaks her vows to a ghost.

Poe makes this psychological split literal through pronoun confusion. "He" could refer to either the living husband or dead D'Elormie throughout. When she sighs "Oh, I am happy now!" while thinking of the dead man, the line becomes savagely ironic—she's only happy in the fantasy where she's with the corpse.

The final stanza's "Would God I could awaken!" reveals this isn't just wedding-day nerves. She's trapped in a waking nightmare where she's legally bound to the wrong man, and the real horror is theological: "Lest the dead who is forsaken / May not be happy now." She fears she's damned D'Elormie's soul by breaking faith. The poem ends mid-anxiety, unresolved—because there's no exit from this marriage except death.