My Sonnet Attempt

I read through some sonnets in the Hughes book, and this was one of my favorites.    

In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleased to dote;
Nor are mine ears with thy tongue's tune delighted,
Nor tender feeling, to base touches prone,
Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee alone:
But my five wits nor my five senses can
Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee,
Who leaves unsway'd the likeness of a man,
Thy proud hearts slave and vassal wretch to be:
Only my plague thus far I count my gain,
That she that makes me sin awards me pain.

Tonight when my husband got home from work, he was... crabby.  And then I was... crabby.  It happens, right?  Anyways, he left for a little while, and I'm thinking it is the right time to hit him with some poetry when he gets home :)  I've never written poetry for my significant otter, but we'll see how it goes!  My sonnet is about the night we started dating.  I don't think it sounds very good or very Shakespearean, but I gave it a shot.

To My Significant Otter

Your shaky hands hold mine so soft

Around, around, around we walk.

The night is cool, the stars aloft

Around, around, around we talk.

Hopeful hearts run wild tonight;

Whispered hopes from deep do strive;

Imagined love on tongues alight

As quiet words on air describe

The terror that we feel inside.

The pumping of our beating chests

Advises us to run and hide

Lest in another soul the future rests.

The mystery of a romance

That time may bring to love perchance.

As imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

I'm interested in the conversations that have been taking place in class as well as on the blogs in regards to imagination.  There seems to be an insecurity when it comes to literature and "saying smart things."  Our discussion of the imagination interested me.  Professor Sexson said that there are no correct interpretations of anything, but just two kinds of misreadings, or levels of thinking... which doesn't make me feel much better about not saying smart things.  And then we looked at Coleridges definition:

The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

So as "imaginers,"we are usually drawing from what has already been created and the original is so brilliant and so inspired that we spend our time trying to make sense of the divine essence of the primary Imagination.  We mimic that essence through words and paintings and notes of music, but those objects remain fixed and dead.  I like that Coleridge uses the verb struggle to describe this process of the imagination.  I falls right into Shakespeare's description of "giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name."  This is the process we experience as Lit majors that many other people never get to experience!

I've struggled with it.  I hate those times when I have nothing to say.  I think there is a correlation there with the rude mechanicals.  I feel like Bottom, bumbling along without much to contribute to the world.

And I blog on... :)

The first video is from the first film version of the play, made in 1909.  I really liked the depiction of the mechanicals and their "language of the street corner."

As I was reading through my classmates' blogs, I was intimidated (as I usually am) by the depth of thought and insight each person brought through their writing.  I was most intrigued with Angel's blog. She wrote a post talking about seeing ourselves in Shakespeare's characters.  And... ah... isn't this the purpose of literature?  (Or one of them, at least?)  I work in the writing center on campus, and often it is so hard to get this point across to writers.  "Your professor does not want you to summarize the book, she wants to know WHY it matters."  And yet, we are so afraid to do this... and often we English majors are the worst!  We talk about ideas and we ponder and we analyze and speculate, but do we ever let what we read shape us?  Do we see the fatal flaws of Theseus or Hamlet, identify with them, and they resolve to change that shared behavior?  I admit that often I do not.  I read for a class, for a professor, for a grade, but I rarely take the time to read in a personal way.  I love the aesthetic aspect of our discipline, memorizing Shakespeare and feeling the beauty of his words, but I'm also a concrete person.  I have to find a way to make these beautiful words I read significant to me and also to the world around me.  Like Angel mentioned in her blog, it is pretty amazing to think that this class of interesting people in this a room filled with Ipads and laptops and Smartphones... we are working through many of the same struggles that the audience of Midsummer Night's Dream was facing.  We are the top and the bottom, the high and the low, and we can identify as wholeheartedly as Shakespeare's original audience.  So maybe that will be my project for the semester.  I will blog about some personal engagement and identification with characters and see what happens...