Art is My Religion

Month: July 2016

  • Sunday Sonnet – 24 July 2016

    Sonnet 116 - 1

    Sonnet 116 epitomizes why Shakespeare is my religion. Other books inspirit us to love, but what is love? This amazing Sonnet, perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest, describes the constancy, depth and beauty of love, and how true love may extend its arc over the length of a entire life. This one I dedicate to Mary, whose birthday is this weekend.  

    116

    Let me not to the marriage of true minds
    Admit impediments. Love is not love
    Which alters when it alteration finds,
    Or bends with the remover to remove:
    O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
    That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
    It is the star to every wandering bark,
    Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
    Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
    Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
    Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
    But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
    If this be error and upon me proved,
    I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

    –William Shakespeare

     

     

  • Sunday Sonnet – 17 July 2016

    My particular madness is the belief that Shakespeare’s sonnets are pertinent to our 21st century lives.  The other night I watched an actor read 40 of these sonnets, accompanied by two lutes and a recorder.  That actor gave me an idea.  Why can’t I do this?  I’m no trained Shakespearean actor and I don’t have a lute.  But I do believe Shakespeare wrote for all us, and wouldn’t mind a fool like me sharing what I love most.  Aloud. 

    Let’s start with one of the early ‘Young Man’ Sonnets, Number 3.  As a young man, I was drawn to this one because of its sexual farming metaphor, and in particular to its great pun on husbandry. As an older man, I recognize the wisdom of its warning.   

    3

    Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest

    Now is the time that face should form another;

    Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,

    Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.

    For where is she so fair whose uneared womb

    Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?

    Or who is he so fond will be the tomb

    Of his self-love, to stop posterity?

    Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee

    Calls back the lovely April of her prime;

    So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,

    Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.

       But if thou live, remembered not to be,

       Die single and thine image dies with thee.