“Shakes’ Find”

William Shakespeare

It seems this western incarnation of poetry had a crush. Or two...

Early in his career he crooned 18 sonnets urging some “lovely boy” to procreate. Perhaps the youngster complied, for Shakespeare’s next 108 sonnets are content simply to praise the youth’s virtues and the immortality of his beauty. Abruptly Will recalibrates and aims a closing 27 sonnets (most would say 28) to some “dark mistress.”

How confusing for biographers; what might have been Will’s sexual preference?

I shake my head that so many scholars of literature underestimate how relentlessly Will (a poet after all!) encases his sonnets in metaphor.

Then I chuckle how they miss his numerology. Or is it merely chance that when the digits of each sonnet group (18, 108, 27) and their total (153) are added... the result is always 9 (long considered by numerologist to be the number of completion)?

The scholars scoff. Yet I find our Will’s a playful tease.

The there’s another coincidence: that Sonnet 33 (numerologically considered a master number) speaks of the heavenly alchemy of the sovereign eye or heaven’s sun. There is much to discuss about ‘suns’ and ‘stars’ in ‘the east’ (which in yoga refers to the forehead): wise men who follow a star in the east; and seekers whose ‘eyes’ should ‘be single.’

[We will find more Shakespeare enigmas and heresies that call upon our own enLightenment when we examine his spiritual explosion.]

Sonnet #17

Who will believe my verse in time to come,
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
Though yet heaven knows it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts.

If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say, “This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.”

So should my papers, yellowed with their age,
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage
And stretched metre of an antique song:

   But were some child of yours alive that time,
   You should live twice, in it, and in my rhyme.

Sonnet #18

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 often 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 ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

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

Sonnet #33

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all triumphant splendor on my brow;
But out alack! he was but one hour mine;
The region cloud hath masked him from me now.

   Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
   Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.

Sonnet #116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,
    I never writ, nor no man ever loved.