[home] [books] [women's] [movies]		 Shakespeare Sonnet
Highlights

 

26

 Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
 Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
 To thee I send this written embassage,
 To witness duty, not to show my wit:
 Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
 May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it,
 But that I hope some good conceit of thine
 In thy soul's thought, all naked, will bestow it:
 Till whatsoever star that guides my moving,
 Points on me graciously with fair aspect,
 And puts apparel on my tottered loving,
 To show me worthy of thy sweet respect:
 Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee;
 Till then, not show my head where thou mayst prove me.
      What could be the new duty for our times?
 
 
 Shakespere's Sonnet 1

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
 That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
 But as the riper should by time decease,
 His tender heir might bear his memory:
 But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
 Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
 Making a famine where abundance lies,
 Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
 Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
 And only herald to the gaudy spring,
 Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
 And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding:
 Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
 To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.
      Imagine ways not to be...Thy self thy foe 

 


 
 
 
30 
 When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
 I summon up remembrance of things past,
 I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
 And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
 Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
 For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
 And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
 And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
 Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
 And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
 The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
 Which I new pay as if not paid before.
 But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
 All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.
      That's it: all it takes is a thought of you
18

 Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
 Thou 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:
 Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
 And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
 And every fair from fair sometime 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 wander'st 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.
      Imagine an unexpected thee. 
 
 

 

14

 Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck;
 And yet methinks I have Astronomy,
 But not to tell of good or evil luck,
 Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons' quality;
 Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
 Pointing to each his thunder, rain and wind,
 Or say with princes if it shall go well
 By oft predict that I in heaven find:
 But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,
 And, constant stars, in them I read such art
 As truth and beauty shall together thrive,
 If from thyself, to store thou wouldst convert; 
 Or else of thee this I prognosticate:
 Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date.

from "thine eyes" my knowledge I derive. 
If I am able to focus on the word  "eyes" alone in any crisis moment, I calm down--I look the other in the eye--but if it is "thine eyes", I am in a meditative mood.  I don't like psuedo-archaic poetry, but when it is used in a legitimate context, I respond, the words evoke a certain transparency between  interior world and exterior experience for me.  Yes. So when Sonnet 14 leaps out of the search engine, I see the line "But from thine eyes my  knowlede derive", I am enter into the meditative mood, a moment of infinite possibility  .

I had read this line before, but this time around, it feels different, and for I am approaching the sonnets  driven by my need for a certain kind of knowledge, to overcome a crisis, a sorrow--you may be doing it to conjure up an experience of love, lost or gained, love that could be lost if not acted upon carefully, without delay. It could even be a purely aesthetic exercise for your mind. In any case, the prolonged dwelling upon the marvel of "thine eyes" and "the art" and "the stars in the eyes" is enough of a comfort.

For me the lament of the poem is not too important. Even the famous ending is not particularly meaningful. It doesn't matter whether we respond exactly to the speaker of the poem and his/her argument. We can derive our own argument, our own knowledge. 

 

 
 
 
[home] [books] [women's] [movies]