Pilgrimage of poems: Beauty's summer dead

It’s Shakespeare’s birthday today (or at least the day it’s celebrated, based on his baptismal date of 26 April); one of those big round-number ones (450, if you're asking). So gotta give you some of the good stuff.

As with last year, it’s hard to pluck out just a couple of gems from his treasure-trove. So, as with last year, I’ll give you one sonnet and one of the speeches from a play.

The speech is Polonius’ advice to his son Laertes, from Hamlet—one of the better-known ones, to be sure. The deal is: Laertes (who is pretty much yang to Hamlet’s yin, inasmuch as he sets fist in motion long before he engages his brain; these days he’d be diagnosed with ADHD, and Hamlet with depression, and they’d both be medicated) is getting the hell out of Elsinore, and Polonius (who is the kind of alter kocker you really hope you won’t get seated next to at a royal dinner party) is dispensing words of wisdom, as he often does.

And we know that the words (which in this case happen to be quite wise) don’t even slow down on their way through Laertes’ brain. But here they are anyhow:

“There- my blessing with thee!

And these few precepts in thy memory

Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,

Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.

Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar:

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,

Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel;

But do not dull thy palm with entertainment

Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade. Beware

Of entrance to a quarrel; but being in,

Bear't that th' opposed may beware of thee.

Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice;

Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,

But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;

For the apparel oft proclaims the man,

And they in France of the best rank and station

Are most select and generous, chief in that.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;

For loan oft loses both itself and friend,

And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

This above all- to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Farewell. My blessing season this in thee!  “

Now here’s my teeny tweak on this: one of my favorite fluffy-flicks is Clueless, Amy Heckering’s update of Jane Austen’s Emma. Cher, the Emma character, is not an intellectual giant. (You should see what she does with a debate on immigration policy.) However, she does have a way of grasping some salient points, even if from an unexpected direction:

There you have the ultimate authoritative literary putdown.

Last year’s sonnet was Number 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”, which I do love. But Number 104 is good, too. Like Cher, this takes on the subject of aging from another perspective.

“Sonnet 104”

To me, fair friend, you never can be old,

For as you were when first your eye I eyed,

Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold

Have from the forests shook three summers' pride;

Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned

In process of the seasons have I seen;

Three April pérfumes in three hot Junes burned,

Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.

Ah yet doth beauty, like a dial hand,

Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived;

So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,

Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived.

  For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred:

  Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.