Photo by By Matthias Bethke – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=149793854
Dear Readers, my lovely friend was buried yesterday, and one of her many great passions was Shakespeare. I read this to her a few days before she died, and at the end she smiled, and whispered ‘marvellous’. If all has gone well, I will also have read this at her funeral. I love how the mood changes at line 10, from despair to exultation.
Farewell, my very special friend.
Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
By William Shakespeare
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,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
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 remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
If you want to hear a very special reading of it, have a listen to Judi Dench on the Graham Norton show here.
What a wonderful thing love is. Beautiful poem.
All strength to your voice when you read it. I have always enjoyed this poem 🙂 🙂
Thank you for signposting Judi Dench’s recitation of this beautiful sonnet. Remarkable.
It’s exquisite, isn’t it.
I hope your friend’s funeral gave you some comfort, as you start to adjust to her loss, and that you were able to read this sonnet as planned. It’s my favourite of all Shakespeare’s sonnets – I know it off by heart.
I think I know it off by heart now too, and so does my long-suffering husband – I kept reading it to him in a hope of ‘disarming’ it, but the line ‘your sweet love remembered’ still had me in tears.
I expect you know this Mary Oliver poem. I find solace in it when I’m grieving.
In Blackwater Woods
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.
So beautiful,, Shannon, thank you….I did know it, but had forgotten it.