Archive for December 6th, 2008

First Edition

A friend gave me a book of Shakespeare’s Sonnets as a wedding gift last week (along with books of poetry by two of my other favorites, T.S. Eliot and Langston Hughes).  Gifts that are both thoughtful and personal are quite difficult for me to pick out… so I try to always give kudos when someone else gives me one.  Thanks!

After discussing the repetitive themes of Sonnets 1-3, I decided to skip ahead a bit.  My good friend, a Mr. Wiki Pedia, informs me that the first 17 or so sonnets share a common message… so, in my search for variety, I hereby skip to:

Sonnet 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 dimm’d,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:
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.

What I get out of it

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