The Search for Lost Time

Plugged the new tube into the cable, and it seems the service now comes with some digital music. While trying to find something to watch, we happened upon "Brush up your Shakespeare" from Kiss Me Kate. For some reason that triggered this old memory trace:

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 oft' is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

...................Big Bill's 18th Sonnet.


As a high school junior I attended a Summer speech camp at the U of MT. My roommate there, a HS soph, fell hard for the pretty hot grad school chick who was one of our instructors. His strategy for wooing her was based on memorizing and reciting to her the 18th Sonnet, above. I seem to recall that she was more bemused than beguiled, but that probably wasn't a definitive test of the "brush up your Shakespeare" theory.

Of course she was about three inches taller than he was, as well as seven years older. So here's to you Bill S., the author and to you Bill (a different) S., the old roomate.

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