The glum depressive pastiche exercise in the sonnet below is of course based on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (which appears as its appendix). The entire idea was to show if I could mimic how easily a cynic can undermine true verse and simplify its emotive nuance – taking only the ‘dark’ unto itself. My first attempt was on the Marvell poem To His Coy Mistress, which I called To My Sour Elder-self. It was even more unbearable than the words immediately below. It was unbearable but partly because I did not know what to do with Marvell’s antisemitism from a world where Jews in diaspora were always literary targets. What a light in the world were they as Zionist Israel casts dark over us all now.
Abandon hope now you've entered your centenary:
Shall I bless you in your short winter’s day?
Because it freezes you to harden'd state:
Blasts the last wizen'd leaf cast to decay.
Winter’s tale progresses to its end-date;
Extinguish'd seems the flame that from hell shines,
And treble dark only follows darkness dimm'd;
Each thing to forlorn formlessness declines,
By chance or nature’s timely course too trimm'd.
Thy expiring winter shall ever fade,
Not own again past light you claim'd you show’st;
The past can't boast that its sun partial shade,
Gives world enough and time for you to grow’st
Now! So short is your breath, your eyes can't see
So clearly, each day takes more life from thee.
With love and apologies
Steven xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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.
Steve_Bamlett_blog 