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Georgia Scott's Reviews > Shakespeare's Sonnets
Shakespeare's Sonnets
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"Cut these words, and they would bleed," I want to gasp. What Montaigne did for Emerson, Shakespeare does for me.
His sonnets weren't taught when I was in school. It was all about the plays. Those were reduced to who did what and when and usually involved a knife. Easy to correct short answers reduced Shakespeare to the police blotter in a small town paper. "Disturbance on Sunday night. Officer called and dispersed youths." It is just as well that the sonnets were not taught, not to be cut up like that.
My first impression was how accessible they are. I understood more than I supposed I would. The language should have been mystifying. Instead it felt, to quote Emerson again, "vascular and alive." The lines like veins pulse with emotion and variance. Now I know why we speak of the body of a poem. These have flesh and bone. Rhythms reminded me of the flow of curves. Their beat, fast or slow, is how bodies move. Rhyme is the repeat of sounds that are uttered. Intimate and loud at once. This is lovemaking poetry. Read them as you would play songs to recollect, or commit again, that madness called love.
His sonnets weren't taught when I was in school. It was all about the plays. Those were reduced to who did what and when and usually involved a knife. Easy to correct short answers reduced Shakespeare to the police blotter in a small town paper. "Disturbance on Sunday night. Officer called and dispersed youths." It is just as well that the sonnets were not taught, not to be cut up like that.
My first impression was how accessible they are. I understood more than I supposed I would. The language should have been mystifying. Instead it felt, to quote Emerson again, "vascular and alive." The lines like veins pulse with emotion and variance. Now I know why we speak of the body of a poem. These have flesh and bone. Rhythms reminded me of the flow of curves. Their beat, fast or slow, is how bodies move. Rhyme is the repeat of sounds that are uttered. Intimate and loud at once. This is lovemaking poetry. Read them as you would play songs to recollect, or commit again, that madness called love.
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Reading Progress
July 16, 2023
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Started Reading
July 16, 2023
– Shelved
July 16, 2023
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October 29, 2023
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Finished Reading
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David
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Oct 28, 2023 11:12AM
Delightful words, Georgia.
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David wrote: "Delightful words, Georgia."Thanks, David. I should have maybe quoted some or named a favorite. But others had, so I'll just pick these two first lines from Sonnet XVII:
"Who will believe my verse in time to come,
If it were fill'd with your most high deserts?"
My favorite sonnets, Georgia! Thanks so much for the wonderful memories!
Nora wrote: "My favorite sonnets, Georgia! Thanks so much for the wonderful memories!"John Donne wrote my favorites until now, Nora. Recommend those, too.
Thank you for this beautiful, inspirational review, Georgia. I have a beautiful book of Shakespeare's sonnets and yet I've never bothered to sit down and read it from beginning to end. Another dreamy "if only" project.;) But I did write a poem called "Buried Rhyme", which is still floating in the deep debris of the net ocean:No matter how you burry form and rhyme,
They'll outlive you, timeless and sublime.
Irena wrote: "Thank you for this beautiful, inspirational review, Georgia. I have a beautiful book of Shakespeare's sonnets and yet I've never bothered to sit down and read it from beginning to end. Another drea..."Rumors of my death are extremely exaggerated, as Mark Twain said. You say it, too, in your poem which begins:
"They wrote on all the walls 'the rhyme is dead'
And stamped all pages with 'the form is rotten,'
Not even once a guilty tear they shed
Above the graves of rhyme and form, forgotten."
You rock the rhythm, girl! Keep writing.
Mark wrote: "Madness indeed. Bravo! >)"Love has to be mad. You can get hurt. It's like swimming with white caps on the waves.
Agreed, yet time and again we take that risk because swimming with the whitecaps is so damn exciting.And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love’s bitter mystery;
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all disheveled wandering stars.
� William Butler Yeats,
from Who Goes with Fergus
Mark wrote: "Agreed, yet time and again we take that risk because swimming with the whitecaps is so damn exciting.And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love’s bitter mystery;
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,..."
Exactly, Mark. As Yeats says about passion: "It all came upon me when I was close upon seventeen like the bursting of a shell. Somnambulistic country girls, when it is upon them, throw plates about or pull them with long hairs in simulation of the poltergeist, or become mediums for the marvelous."
Thank you, Georgia! Cool, Yeats! I like “mediums for the marvelous.� >)
Mark wrote: "Thank you, Georgia! Cool, Yeats! I like “mediums for the marvelous.� >)"
Reading Yeats is like hearing a beautifully played instrument. Every word is melodious. His voice comes through even in his "Selected Essays" and on every subject he chooses.
There is so much to be enjoyed in the sound and cadence of written words. >)
Mark wrote: "There is so much to be enjoyed in the sound and cadence of written words. >)"A pen like a sword depends for its beauty on who wields it. A great writer and great fencer know that skill shouldn't shine but disappear into what seems ease. Yeats and Shakespeare do this.
I may not be able to describe the particular qualities and the special effect they can produce on my sensibilities, but beautiful writing seems always to have it’s own magical way of drawing attention to itself. “To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it.�
� George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?�
� Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters
Mark wrote: "I may not be able to describe the particular qualities and the special effect they can produce on my sensibilities, but beautiful writing seems always to have it’s own magical way of drawing attent..."The excitement, for me of writing, is not knowing where a poem or some prose will lead. I think that if the writer feels this sensation and puts in the labor of love for the words, then, the reader will feel that thrill, too. Thanks for the quotes that lead me to these thoughts, Mark.
Cool. You are most welcome. >)Ps. I know with my own writing, limited as it is to short letters and reviews, that if I put in the time to do revisions that a piece can sort of take on a life of it’s own: demanding a certain sound and cadence that can draw the writing to someplace unsupposed when I started. Of course the basis of revision is reading, and I do find reading my own writing a particularly difficult task sometimes. >)
Since we’re sharing Yeats� quotes, I came across this clever line awhile ago:
“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.�
� Yeats, William Butler
Mark wrote: "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." - Yeats, William Butler.Wonderful quote, Mark. Thank you!
