Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Though art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest in his shade;
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
- W.S.
It was a performance of All's Well That Ends Well that we had the pleasure of attending yesterday evening. It was enjoyed by all (despite the rather chilly temperatures!) and I am happy to say that it ended well this time too.
In this sonnet Shakespeare touches on the idea of the immortality of writing. Watching the play last night, I was struck how the acting brought the play to life. It can be fun to think about how some words written on paper can become an entity and live on down through the generations; just think how many Helens there have been over the course of time. And yet, although he was speaking of the immortality of the work or the subject through the work, I think that the author also has claim to some of this extra life that seems to be floating around here.
But I'll leave it there since there are so many paths branching off that I don't want to have to keep them all straight.
Just some pots to thonder...
No comments:
Post a Comment