Shakespeare, Poetry, And The Power Of Art

Poetry can have an incredibly polarizing effect: people tend to either swear by at or swear at it. What gives? Well, aside from the fact that good poetry can be dauntingly elitist while bad poetry is, as a rule, truly god-awful, art in general is a very powerful medium and poetry is one particularly artsy and inaccessible form of art. In fact, poetry is so powerful that it can be wielded against other people. Not just in the sense of intimidating your classmates with a spiffy beret, or holding your book of Keats a foot away from your face so that everyone in the coffee shop can see how brilliant you are; were talking immortality, manipulation, and objectification here. Shakespeare, that means you.

Just about everybody is familiar with the opening lines of Shakespeares Sonnet 18, which read, Shall I compare thee to a summers day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Pretty romantic stuff. Until you read the next 14 lines. Shakespeare goes on to describe the fleetingness of natural beauty in comparison to the subject of the poem, yadda yadda yadda, and ultimately decides that death could never claim his beloved When in eternal lines to time thou growst. Whaa?! Lines of what, exactly? Well, considering that this is poetry, its pretty safe to assume that the eternal lines to time in which the subject growst are referring to the lines of Shakespeares own poem. Roughly translated: death cant touch you so long as youre in my poem, Sweetcheeks. Or something to that effect. In other words, theres nothing inherently wonderful or eternal about the beloved of this poem (whom weve learned absolutely nothing about, by the way); its merely the fact that (s)he happens to be in the poem that gives Shakespeares beloved any greatness.

In case he wasnt being clear enough, Shakespeare closes the poem with: So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Kind of presumptuous to declare that your poetry will exist so long as men can breathe, but thats Shakespeare for you. If you still arent convinced, stop and think about the fact that Sonnet 18 ends in the word thee. The significance? Sonnets are written in iambic pentameter with alternating stresses (shall I comPARE thee TO a SUMmers DAY / thou ART more LOVEly AND more TEMperATE), meaning certain syllables are given importance while others are not. You might have noticed that, already in the first two lines, I is stressed while thee and thou are not. Whos the subject of this poem again? In fact, thee and thou appear in the sonnet a total four times, but only one of these the final thee falls on a stressed syllable. Long story short, the person to whom Sonnet 18 is addressed only receives any special importance at the very culmination of the poem i.e., when Shakespeares mad poetry skills have had a chance to work their transformative magic. Throw all this on top of the fact that Shakespeare is writing a supposedly intimate love poem but fully expects it to be read the whole world over for, you know, the rest of eternity, and youve got yourself one hell of a power trip.

Moral of the story? Skip the beret and write yourself some poetry. Ya arrogant jerk.