April is National Poetry Month, as diligent readers of the Preposterous blogroll have already been told by Lauren, Roxanne, and Amanda (at the least — I’m not the most diligent reader myself). Since we already have occasional poetry around here, let’s celebrate by dipping into the classics. How about Shakespeare’s 18th Sonnet?
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.
Perhaps you’ve heard this one before, but it holds up. It’s on my mind due to a scene from Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, currently playing at the Court Theatre at UofC. In the play, Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara creates a new work by cutting the sonnet into fragments and pulling them randomly out of a hat.
Darling–
shake thou thy gold buds
the untrimmed but short fair shade
shines–
see, this lovely hot possession growest
so long
by nature’s course–
so … long — heaven!
And declines,
summer changing, more temperate complexion …
Quite a compelling result — but something tells me the version presented in the play wasn’t really produced quite so randomly.