Beatrice Saint Forte, the main character in Edwidge Danticat‘s story “The Bridal Seamstress” (a chapter in her novel-in-stories The Dew Breaker), explains: “When any of my girls puts on one of my dresses, everyone at the wedding is going to be looking at it. When they’re singing ‘Here comes the bride,’ they’re really singing “Here comes the dress.'”
This is true of too many poems. The dress is beautiful but the bride invisible, or worse, absent altogether, having eloped with a lover who understands that “there’s more enterprise / In walking naked.”