Poem: The Old Yet New, Enduring Cord

This poem had the honor of asking my wife (then girlfriend) to marry me before I did. Knowing that I wanted to propose to her soon, I decided to write her a poem with the magical “Will you marry me?” encoded in it. The goal with this was to give her the poem to read, and when she finished she would look up to see me on one knee. This went off splendidly as planned, but it wasn’t until later that I eventually told her of what was coded in the poem. I didn’t expect her to decode it immediately (who would without knowing that there was something hidden in it?), but it was a fun exercise for me.