Wichita State English professor Adam Scheffler loves romance… but also values a good reality check. He explains how Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65 offers both, in today’s Why Should I Read This?
Time destroys everything: statues, stones, even the continents and seas as we know them. This is the cheery thought that launches Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65, one of many sonnets obsessed with an attractive young gentleman, whom the bard wants to rescue from the ravages of time and its “spoil of beauty” by placing him safely inside the cryogenic chamber of a love poem. Arguably, though, it’s not the young man, or even Shakespeare’s love for him, that gets preserved here, but only the poet’s wish that he could pause his love, freeze his feelings in verse, so that in “black ink my love may still shine bright.” The young gentleman remains anonymous, Shakespeare is dust and DNA under Holy Trinity Church, but 400 years later, that wish endures, and not a letter of it has been lost.
