Shall I compare thee?
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate
This old anthology-piece –
This strangeness out of nowhere on the page of the book I’ve covered in thick plastic because everyone covers their textbooks to sell to next year’s class, with the ink of my red-biro’d name already blurred and spread to a vivid smudging pink in the plastic texture, and I’m sitting here, thousands of miles and hundreds of years away, spending my eyes trying to make my name sharp again while wondering how much the spreading blurring matters – bored and uncomprehending because I can read the poem and it makes sense (so why is it important?) – reading it with a sigh because this week is the week they’ve decided to teach poetry again.
This sonnet’s full of praise, syntactically sturdy & forthright, the language rich rather than frilled, tender as well as rich; and Shake’s verse has declared itself the young man’s immortality even before we understand what Scarry has said: that all the letters of Henry Constable’s name are contained in the last line, and that reading the line aloud does cause his name to be said by the reader, cause Constable to live beyond death.
Shall I compare you to a summer’s day?
You are more lovely and more temperate.
These lines leave me agape.
summer’s day, you more lovely, more temperate, you, temperate, lovely, you summer lovely day
The second line is so gentle, forthright, and open, so much about the “you” spoken to, so utterly not about the speaker, that it shatters the defensiveness at the attack or denigration I automatically anticipate at compare –
A lifetime of experience with compare: compared to anyone I’ve ever met you’re worse. Compared to, Why can’t you be more like. Lazy, selfish. Sheila, girlie, sneer, dismiss, denigrate, sneer, scoff, spit.
It cuts right through.
It cuts right through the multilayered sarcophagus of misogyny I’ve lived in. I can see its thickness. I can see it fall apart. I can see how thick it is, pyramid thick
Who dares to write like that? Who could accept being spoken to like that?
More lovely. Lovely – the word accurate and intimate, speaking of the experience of another person; more lovely, the speaker like someone overcome, speaking close, at whisper distance, the reaction pulled straight out of him – Not lovelier, its consecutive unstressed syllables creating a fading blur of the readers’ attention and their apprehension of the loveliness. More lovely: the person spoken to being wholly seen and approved of and desirable without change: loved.
Gentleness strikes me (fear and lightning), unshells me to a world I’m not equipped to live in.
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