william shakespeare
Sonnets
Six months ago I decided to memorize a sonnet a week. After three weeks other business came along, and I revised it to a sonnet a month. It's a way of keeping the mind in shape.
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It occurred to me that a sonnet is very like a dramatic monologue, or sometimes an internal monologue. In my favorite sonnets, there's a character who isn't exactly the poet, and isn't exactly not.
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Take this one: A great many words have been written about how self-pitying the character is, but I recognize something more likeable in him. He reminds me of my students, who believed that in life, "It's not what you know that counts, but who you know."
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I'd argue the impermanence of friendship, and I'd tell them knowledge won't desert you, even as it evolves, but I made no headway.
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Sonnet 29
by William Shakespeare
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Shakespeare's young man is frustrated because he has no money and no status, no "friends" in the current sense of the word. Keen to get on in the world, he would benefit if he had the right wardrobe, a better haircut, a list of influential and benevolent contacts, and a makeover. He's not so different from a hundred million of you or me.
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But someone back home loves and believes in him. He has a connection, far away but always "there," to whom he can turn in confidence. It's someone with no worldly power, no status, and probably no money. Someone who has given him the profoundest gift.