Poetry

Shakespeare, The Bard, Poet of Stratford-on-Avon -- his is a household name which needs no introduction. Indeed, one can scarcely get through high school in this country without being exposed to several of his plays. However, his poetry is not quite as widely-known, except perhaps to those who went on to become English majors in college. But you don't have to be an English major to appreciate the beauty of Shakespeare's sonnets, like the one I'm going to share with you today:


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.


-- William Shakespeare



What is a sonnet? A sonnet is a poem composed of fourteen lines of ten syllables each. Shakespeare's sonnets are written in iambic pentameter, a rhythm compared to that of the human heartbeat. Try reading it out loud to hear how it sounds. In each stanza of the sonnet, the first and third lines rhyme, as do the second and fourth. The last stanza is the exception to this rule, having only two lines to rhyme.