These breezy, blessedly cool days of early May bring to mind the man who had words for nearly every human occasion: William Shakespeare.
Keats as an aspiring young poet imagined Shakespeare sitting at his desk writing. Struggling with "Endymion,” Keats sought to emulate Shakespeare's posture, the way he held his pen, his dedication.
As spring lingers with windy days and pleasant weather, I wondered if Shakespeare had lived through a similar May when composing Sonnet 18: "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?"
In the sonnet, written in perfect iambic pentameter, Shakespeare arrogantly assures a beloved young man or woman that he or she will achieve immortality through the poem, claiming that it will be read "so long as men can breathe or eyes can see." The boast has proven good for more than 400 years so far.
We can only imagine the young lover's beauty and "temperate" personality. Like Shakespeare and everyone else alive at that moment, he or she would die. That's the sadness underlying the poem.
This spring's flowers are almost gone, and another summer will soon arrive. With each passing day, I'm aware that I'm more like Lear than Hamlet.
As I walked one recent windswept afternoon, I called to mind Shakespeare's words, still new after all these years.
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.
