Sherry Chandler » Sonnet LXXIII
Sonnet LXXIII
Good morning, gentle readers.
It was a beautiful weekend at the Catherine Spalding Retreat Center. The grounds there are dotted with gorgeous old trees that seemed to have hung on to their autumn reds and golds just for us. I actually hugged a bark-peeling sycamore that had put out a low branch at just shoulder height and just the diameter of my embrace – just such a branch as twenty years ago (all right, maybe 40) I might have loved to perch on with my book, now just right for leaning and watching water flow along a grass-filled branch.
Some discussion at the Poetry in Progress Retreat about what is iambic pentameter and what is a sonnet. These questions may seem to you to have a simple answer but it is not always so in these post-deconstructionist times. Here is a very famous Shakespearean sonnet that, though belied by this last weekend’s sunny warmth, still seems about right for this time of year. (Note how the Shakespearean demands to be resolved in an ending couplet — a form that allowed Shakespeare to extend his discussion of the problem but forced him often to seem to end with a quip. You also see some differences in pronoun usage – that “his” in the 10th line would be “its” today.)
Sonnet LXXIII
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
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