epithalamium

Genre of poetry or song devised for a wedding, and specifically to be performed outside the married couple's room. First examples survive from Ancient Greece (for example, by the Roman poet Catullus), but the best examples are from the Renaissance, including the English poet Edmund Spenser's Epithalamion. Later poets, including the English John Dryden and Percy Bysshe Shelley, followed this example and, in the 20th Century, so did the English-born US poet W H Auden.