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Compare and contrast Barnet’s sonnet with one or more
Shakespearean sonnets below with the conceit that the writer makes the
person addressed immortal. This is not a contest. Multiple student essays accepted and eligiable for payment from $100 to $150. Accepted essays will be published on CRES.ORG and in a companion volume to the 2nd edition of Thanks for Noticing. Writers should honestly appraise the sonnet "Ad Astra" as they compare it with one or more of Shakepeare's with the theme of making the person the sonnet addresses immortal. It is expected that most writers will find Shakespeare the superior writer, but why? Does "Ad Astra" immitate the Bard too closely? or does it have an independent integrity? What about the formal sonnet structure? (A review of the sonnet form can be found here.) What are the most effective images and metaphors? How do effective are the sonnets when read aloud? How else might one best compare and contrast the sonnets? Does the glass after "Ad Astra" diminish or enhance the sonnet? Are notes in various editions of Shakespeare's sonnets justified? Questions? -- write vern@cres.org for answers. VERN BARNET 14. Ad Astra L’amour che muove il sole e l’altre stelle. Speciosus forma prae filiis hominum diffusa est gratia in labiis tuis; propterea benedixit te Deus in aeternum. IN my frail frame immortal love doth dwell; and in these lines with borrowed breath you live. No skill can keep my body from death’s spell; what skill I have doth life forever give to you and me conjoined in sounds that they shall speak who never knew us, though they gaze long through the window of this page, and say with wonder how we loved, in our brute age. And yet no words I write can e’er be true; they all fumble, flunk, fall, deform, and fail the infinite mystery that is you and me, like calling minnow what is whale. No lay can list to others what is ours though yet these rimes might reach as far as stars. Ad Astra: Latin, to the stars. The first EPIGRAPH is the last line from Dante’s Divina Commedia, “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Rumi wrote, “Love is the astrolabe of the Mysteries of God” (Baldock, p181) «The Sun». E2: Pslam 44:3 in the Vulgate; in many English translations, 45:2 “You are the fairest of men; charm plays on your lips for God has blessed you forever.” Frame: the human body, the framework of a poem (in Shakespeare’s use), or the case or structure for a window. A lay is a short lyric for a song; for the tune for this sonnet, see the Frontispiece. The word is often a pun. The language, style, and theme of this sonnet imitates Shake speare’s Sonnet 55 (and others like 17, 18, 60, 63, 65, 81, 101, 107, and 108, perhaps also like the pair of 59 and 106), and employs the Renaissance convention that poetry, unlike flesh, is permanent. But this motif, that art survives the body, sometimes called the monumentum trope, is not an ego tistical claim so much as a tradition originating with the classics, such as with Dante, Inferno 4.97, Ovid, Amores 1.15.41, and Horace, Odes 3.30, which Shake speare seems almost to imitate: Exegi monumentum aere perennius — well, maybe some egotism. Some have compared Shakespeare’s to Spenser’s Sonnet 32 in his 1591 The Ruines of Rome, itself a translation from Joachim du Bellay, 1553 Antiquités de Rome. Some of the poetic devices «Ad Astra» employs are illustrated in the § Introduction to this book under ¶ 17. Window of this page: In De la grammatologie, 1967 = Of Grammatology, 1976, Jacques Derrida writes “Il n'y a pas de hors-texte,” which some understand to mean that context is unavoidable. Brute age: homophobic times. True: see Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant—.” * SHAKESPEARE 18 VENDER’S MODERNIZATION 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 dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed: But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest 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. SHAKESPEARE 19 VENDER’S MODERNIZATION Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws, And make the earth devour her own sweet brood; Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws, And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood; Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet’st, And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time, To the wide world and all her fading sweets; But I forbid thee one most heinous crime: O carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow, Nor draw no lines there with thine ántique pen; Him in thy course untainted do allow For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men. Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong, My love shall in my verse ever live young. * SHAKESPEARE 55 VENDER’S MODERNIZATION Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme; But you shall shine more bright in these conténts Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time. When wasteful war shall statues overturn And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire, shall burn The living record of your memory: ’Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity, Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom. So, till the Judgement that yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes. SHAKESPEARE 81 VENDER’S MODERNIZATION Or I shall live, your epitaph to make; Or you survive, when I in earth am rotten; From hence your memory death cannot take, Although in me each part will be forgotten. Your name from hence immortal life shall have, Though I (once gone) to all the world must die; The earth can yield me but a common grave, When you entombèd in men’s eyes shall lie. Your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read, And tongues to be your being shall rehearse, When all the breathers of this world are dead. You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen) Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men. 107 SHAKESPEARE VENDER’S MODERNIZATION Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come, Can yet the lease of my true love control, Supposed as forfeit to a cónfined doom. The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured, And the sad augurs mock their own preságe; Incertainties now crown themselves assured, And peace proclaims olives of endless age. Now with the drops of this most balmy time My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, Since spite of him I’ll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes: And thou in this shalt find thy monument, When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent. |