The Pelican Shakespeare: Sonnets | 
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New reading, or more accurately crafting light, came with a quote from the Bard.
They are the books,
the arts,
the academes,
That show,
contain,
and nourish all the world.
#SundayFunday @BookmarkTavern
William Shakespeare! I can imagine the prose he would write about himself would be spectacular.
The universe must want me to have a set of The Yale Shakespeare.I found 5 at a thrift shop, then 4 more at a weekend book sale!
New episode just posted over on Patreon! We begin by discussing how some folks claim they could write better than Shakespeare if they had the time. We delve into why some tech types think along these lines and discuss why art isn't necessarily a measurable science. Then we get down to business with selecting our newest Thriller!
https://www.patreon.com/therewillbebooks
A little over a decade later, thanks to a friend and the Newberry Library collection, I‘ve had the pleasure of seeing (and touching!) my second first folio.
Today I went LockTheBox event in my city. I was an experience of its own kind. But I realised I'm more suited to buy either from Tagore Book Fair or Random Shops or Online shopping, but not from this one types. It was pretty tiring and I couldn't enjoy much. But anyways it was good experience though 😃
pickI kind a feel like I completed a marathon. I made it! Following our map laid by @GingerAntics of 22 a week, my mornings for 7 weeks have been working through these 154 sonnets. They‘re difficult, but as you work through them they open themselves up with so much language play.
I like this Pelican edition, the one in front. The notes were curt, but smart and insightful. It doesn‘t have any real analysis.
Loved our little #shakespearerealong team
Sonnet 116 - on the constancy and permanence of love - an ever-fixèd mark - never shaken. This sonnet comes amongst a sudden change in trend. A once jealous author has put himself on the defensive. So, take it at its meaning and as it‘s undermined.
Pictured over Michael Stipe, because it has me thinking of how he discarded the permanence of love in REM‘s This One Goes Out to the One I Love.
#shakespearereadalong
I‘m a Covid rebound case. Back in isolation. Day 13.
I really took to Sonnet 104, which I thought was beautiful, but quieter, with a gentle kindness. (Although choosing a mere 3 yrs as his time element may be satirical.)
This one stands out as gentler than anything before. So when the next Sonnet, 105 says “Since all alike my songs and praises be/To one, of one, still such, and ever so”, I imagine he‘s being intentionally provocative.
Sonnet 102 - one in a sequence on the struggle to capture his lover‘s beauty.
Our love was new, and then but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays;
As Philomel in summer‘s front doth sing,
And stops his pipe in growth of riper days:
In Ovid‘s metamorphoses Philomel was raped by her sister‘s husband, who cut out her tongue so she couldn‘t tell anyone. Later she was turned into a nightingale (hence the picture).
Sonnet 93 explores what we do and don‘t reveal with our face, thinking (of course) about infidelity.
“How like Eve‘s apple doth thy beauty grow”
My cat wasn‘t Litsy-friendly (a poor litten) if you want to read the text, but you can find the full text here: https://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonnet/93
#shakespeareresdalong
Sonnet 85 and the silent muse.
Image too cheesy? 😁
I found Sonnet 86, where WS says he was not silenced by great poetry, but by “you” alone, powerfully written. But I‘m partial to the silent struggle expressed here - while “precious phrase by all the muses filed”…i‘m left with “my dumb thoughts, speaking in effect”
unlettered clerk: “the illiterate parish clerk (whose duty is to lead the congregation‘s responses, and cries Amen to everything)”
Sonnet 81
@batsy has me thinking about WS‘s petulance. ☺️ Here our jealous poet overlays this with thoughts on his legacy, the distant future, “When all breathers of this world are dead.” He‘s so focused on death, he has to remind us readers of our own, making us all think sadly of generations long ahead that have forgotten us…but not WS and his muse: “And tongues to be your being shall rehearse…You still shall live”
#shakespearereadalong
Sonnet 74
When thou reviewest this, thou dost review
The very part that was consecrate to thee
#shakespearereadalong
Sonnets 71-73 look at death in tortured ways (a passive aggressive you should forget me). Here, in Sonnet 73, it‘s compared to autumn and winter.
“Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang” can lead us to imagine a beautiful image of a leave-less late fall tree, or a romantic one of the many ruined Catholic choirs in the abandoned churches of WS‘s time, or, as here, the ugly medical army against our covid pandemic. (Paxlovid, etc).
The first four lines of Sonnet 60 are familiar and beautiful to me, their expression of time and experience as a sequence of ripples on on the shore. I‘m always caught on the line “in sequent toil all forwards do contend”, as a metaphor for life. Also, later in the poem I love the bitter line: “And time that gave doth now his gift confound”
#shakespearereadalong
Sonnet 54, with some wild flowers from today.
Sketch synopsis: Your faithfulness makes you like a scented rose and, when your beauty fades, my poetry, like perfume, distills your true essence.
Canker-blooms are scentless, wild, dog roses. Wildflowers seemed like a decent replacement. They seemed to “play as wantonly when summer‘s breath their masked buds discloses”
#shakespearereadalong
For the morning, Sonnet 50, on Breckenridge mountain. I was going to read this on my hike yesterday, but I was too exhausted to read a sonnet. Saw the word journey, snapped the picture. So only this morning do I grasp he‘s traveling away from his lover by horse. Since I came here from overheated topography-compromised Houston, I can‘t say this resembles in any way how I felt. ☺️
#shakespearereadalong
…that pour‘st into my verse
Thine own sweet argument
Good morning, from sonnet 38
#shakespearereadalong
Sonnet 33 for the morning, the first of four comparing the trials of love to the changing weather.
Here the love is like the sun, “Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy”, turning pale streams gold - “but one hour mine”.
(“the ugly rack on his celestial face” is cloud cover blocking the sun)
#shakespearereadalong
Sonnet 31 for the morning, a mourning of deceased lovers or dead love. (Curious if he means he‘s lacking a heart.) But “lovers” can mean many things, and religious love can mean faithful or perhaps (?) something more like fraternal or even family love. I thought of Hamnet, the bard‘s deceased son, and wondering if he had this lost son in mind. #shakespearereadalong
#shakespearereadalong #catherbuddyread - A Song of the Lark reference, Sonnet 29
Imagining Cather‘s opera singer, feeling outcast, dusting off the Colorado sand hills, yet in a state, while singing, richer than kings.
