haply I think on thee

I am BREAKING WITH TRADITION, Y'ALL. For four years I have posted Ben Jonson's eulogy to Shakespeare, To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare and What He Hath Left Us in honour of Shakespeare's alleged birthday. I love it, I highly recommend it, and I'll wait, while you go and read it -- especially if you haven't, and you love Shakespeare. But I thought I might shake things up a little, this year. I recommend reading this poem more than once.

In Shakespeare a lover turns into an ass
as you would expect. People confuse
their consciences with ghosts and witches.
Old men throw everything away
because they panic and can’t feel their lives.
They pinch themselves, pierce themselves with twigs,
cliffs, lightning, and die—yes, finally—in glad pain.

You marry a woman you’ve never talked to,
a woman you thought was a boy.
Sixteen years go by as a curtain billows
once, twice. Your children are lost,
they come back, you don’t remember how.
A love turns to a statue in a dress, the statue
comes back to life. Oh God, it’s all so realistic
I can’t stand it. Whereat I weep and sing.

Such a relief, to burst from the theatre
into our cool, imaginary streets
where we know who’s who and what’s what,
and command with Metrocards our destinations.
Where no one with a story struggling in him
convulses as it eats its way out,
and no one in an antiseptic corridor,
or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains,
staggers through an Act that just will not end,
eyes burning with the burning of the dead.

—James Richardson, 'In Shakespeare', first published in The New Yorker, February 12, 2007.

And a sonnet:

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,—and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

—William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Sonnet XXIX. (Dialogue in my apartment just now: OLIVIA: You know what I love about Shakespeare's sonnets? They're basically all about Will's poly angst. EVE: I love you.)