Quotes & Sayings About Sonnets

No decent man ought to read Shakespeare's sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes. — Virginia Woolf

I don't think I can really believe in doomsday; I could hardly believe in rewards and punishments, in heaven or hell. As I wrote down in one of my sonnets - I seem to be always plagiarizing, imitating myself or somebody else for that matter - I think I am quite unworthy of heaven or of hell, and even of immortality. — Jorge Luis Borges

As there is no narrative, his poetry has been described as lyrical. As A. J. Smith observes, 'The most directly influential body of lyric poetry in European literature Il Canzoniere of Petrarch consists of some three hundred and eighty sonnets, madrigals and canzoni, sensitively registering every nuance of the poet's forty-seven-year devotion to one Laura. — Brenda Liddy

Love. The stuff of sonnets and madrigals and fairy tales and novels.
Love. The elusive emotion that made men weep and sing and ache with desire and passion.
Love. The life-altering feeling that made everything bright and warm and wonderful. The emotion all the world was desperate to discover. — Sarah MacLean

It is curious that I always want to group things, a series of sonnets, a series of photographs; whatever rationalizations appear, they originate in urges that are rarely satisfied with single images. — Minor White

I am sonnets full of stardust within the meter of my skin. — Patricia Robin Woodruff

The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. — G.K. Chesterton

The roaches were in high spirits. There were half a dozen of them, caught in the teeth of love. They capered across the liquor bottles, perched atop pour spouts like wooden ladies on the prows of sailing ships. They lifted their wings and delicately fluttered. They swung their antennae with a ripe sexual urgency, tracing love sonnets in the air. — Nathan Ballingrud

Like a Passover Poet gliding from house to house and from trembling soul to trembling soul the wind scribbled sonnets of first time love and weeping haikus of last hours on earth. — Aberjhani

I am a close friend of Robert Loggia. And I just love how, with actors, there's the screen persona. Here is Robert, known for his portrayal of many characters, including gangsters. But in real life, he is elegant and erudite. He sits in the garden reading the sonnets of William Shakespeare. — Luanne Rice

I can't pray or weigh my words right; doomsday
is here my friend, but you're immune. We suffer
for you. I'm weaving crowns of sonnets, dreads;
a souvenir so you'll never forget your friends. — Jalina Mhyana

Your days are your sonnets. — Oscar Wilde

Were kisses all the joys in bed,/One woman would another wed. — William Shakespeare

There is a special department of Hell for students of probability. In this department there are many typewriters and many monkeys. Every time that a monkey walks on a typewriter, it types by chance one of Shakespeare's sonnets. — Bertrand Russell

That is because he's a gentleman," I spat, through with this little game of his.
He laughed but his grip had yet to loosen. "Yeah, that's right. Luke is candy hearts, love sonnets and roses. I'm edible body lotion and lost panties," he said, disgustedly.
Somehow through all of this, I managed to feel sorry for him. "Flynn," I uttered.
"God, Mercy, stop saying my name like that. — Shannon Dermott

Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon The author of Lear remains unshaken Willie Herbert or Mary Fitton What does it matter? The Sonnets were written. — Noel Coward

After you kind of find your footing, sonnets are what comes easiest. — Marilyn Nelson

No, I can't stop for sonnets; my mother is sitting up. I'll look you up tomorrow, sometime or other, and do for goodness' sake try and realise that you're a pestilential scourge, or your find yourself in a most awful fix. Good-night! — Kenneth Grahame

When sonneteering Wordsworth re-creates the landing of Mary Queen of Scots at the mouth of the Derwent -
Dear to the Loves, and to the Graces vowed,
The Queen drew back the wimple that she wore
- he unveils nothing less than a canvas by Rubens, baroque master of baroque masters; this is the landing of a TRAGIC Marie de Medicis.
Yet so receptive was the English ear to sheep-Wordsworth's perverse 'Enough of Art' that it is not any of these works of supreme art, these master-sonnets of English literature, that are sold as picture postcards, with the text in lieu of the view, in the Lake District! it is those eternally, infernally sprightly Daffodils. — Brigid Brophy

Not only to myself or before the mirror or at the hour of my death, which I hope will be long in coming, but in the presence of my children and my wife and in the face of the peaceful life I'm building, I must acknowledge: (1) That under Stalin I wouldn't have wasted my youth in the gulag or ended up with a bullet in the back of my head. (2) That in the McCarthy era I wouldn't have lost my job or had to pump gas at a gas station. (3) That under Hitler, however, I would have been one of those who chose the path of exile, and that under Franco I wouldn't have composed sonnets to the caudillo or the Holy Virgin like so many lifelong democrats. One thing is as true as the other. My bravery has its limits, certainly, but so does what I'm willing to swallow. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy. — Roberto Bolano

Rich women, including the queen, made themselves additionally beauteous by bleaching their skin with compounds of borax, sulfur, and lead - all at least mildly toxic, sometimes very much more so - for pale skin was a sign of supreme loveliness. (Which makes the "dark lady" of Shakespeare's sonnets an exotic being in the extreme.) — Bill Bryson

I love it when you talk clean to me, quoting training manuals like sonnets. — Amanda Hocking

I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come out of him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve ... I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. — Vladimir Nabokov

Why people fall in love has been debated since before Shakespeare's sonnets. — Joe Bruno

People frequently comment on the emptiness in one night stands, but emptiness here has always been just another word for darkness. Blind encounters writing sonnets no one can ever read. Desire and pain communicated in the vague language of sex.
None of which made sense to me until much later when I realized everything I thought I'd retained of my encounters added up to so very little, hardly enduring, just shadows of love outlining nothing at all. — Mark Z. Danielewski

I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public. — Aldous Huxley

The techno-political thriller and the romance novel serve as antidotes to the imagination rather than stimulants to it. For this reason they make for ideal reading in airports and airplanes. They effectively shut down the imagination by doing all its work for it. They leave the spirit or the soul - and ambiguity, for that matter - out of the equation. By shutting down the imagination, genre novels perform a useful service to the anxious air traveler by reducing his or her ability to speculate. For the most part, people on airplanes, and here I include myself, would rather not use their speculative imaginations at all; one consequence of this situation is that great poetry is virtually unreadable during turbulence, when the snack cart has been put away and the seat belts fastened. Enough anxiety is associated with air travel without Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus making it worse. — Charles Baxter

No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath ... We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it? -Donald Miller,Through Painted Deserts — Donald Miller

I'm thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art, And this is the only immortality that you and I may share, my Lolita. — Vladimir Nabokov

For all that beauty that doth cover thee
Is but the seemly raiment of my heart,
Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me.
How can I then be elder than thou art? — William Shakespeare

Good God, Enrique was writing poetry to her? Yes, and why hadn't he thought of poetry? Besides the obvious reason of his absence of talent in that direction. He wondered if she'd like to read a really clever combat-drop mission plan, instead. Sonnets, damn. All he'd ever come up with in that line were limericks. He — Lois McMaster Bujold

The Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XII
Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Human bipolarity was both the binding force and the driving energy for all human behavior, from sonnets to nuclear equations. If any being thinks that human psychologists exaggerate on this point, let it search Terran patent offices, libraries, and art galleries for creations of eunuchs. — Robert A. Heinlein

I thought about evolutionary historians who argued that walking was a central part of what it meant to be human. Our two-legged motion was what first differentiated us from the apes. It freed our hands for tools and carried us onthe long marches out of Africa. As a species, we colonized the world on foot. Most of human history was created through contacts conducted at walking pace, even when some rode horses. I thought of the pilgrimages to Compostela in Spain; to Mecca; to the source of the Ganges; and of wandering dervishes, sadhus; and friars who approached God on foot. The Buddha meditated by walking and Wordsworth composed sonnets while striding beside the lakes.
Bruce Chatwin concluded from all this that we would think and live better and be closer to our purpose as humans if we moved continually on foot across the surface of the earth. I was not sure I was living or thinking any better. — Rory Stewart

To give yourself away keep yourself still,
And you must live drawn by your own sweet skill. — William Shakespeare

Most girls want love sonnets, and you want a song about a cowboy wanted dead of alive- Jax Stone — Abbi Glines

Because God the Sonnets is made of the energy of the Holy Spirit, He is the door for us to enter the Kingdom of Heaven...The Buddha is also described as a door, a teacher, who shows us the way in this life. — Thich Nhat Hanh

The woodchopper reads the wisdom of the ages recorded on the paper that holds his dinner, then lights his pipe with it. When we ask for a scrap of paper for the most trivial use, it may have the confessions of Augustine or the sonnets of Shakespeare, and we not observe it. The student kindles his fire, the editor packs his trunk, the sportsman loads his gun, the traveler wraps his dinner, the Irishman papers his shanty, the schoolboy peppers the plastering, the belle pins up her hair, with the printed thoughts of men. — Henry David Thoreau

Ah, Evelyn and Vivian, I love you both, I love you for your sad lives, the empty misery of your coming home at dawn. You too are alone, but you are not like Arturo Bandini, who is neither fish, fowl nor good red herring. So have your champagne, because I love you both, and you too, Vivian, even if your mouth looks like it had been dug out with raw fingernails and your old child's eyes swim in blood written like mad sonnets. — John Fante

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife, He would have written sonnets all his life?. — Lord Byron

Disperse the sorrow of my sadden'd mind
O Lord, help me some blessed peace to find! — Timothy Salter

Oh, there are no living poets, Miss Van Damn. We're not entirely sure there ever were. They've found some shreds of sonnets in England and, embedded in a chalk wall of a cave in France, some yet undetermined thing which might be the legendary inward eye. But all evidence, such as it is, suggests that, if there ever were poets, they were all burned into extinction during the interglacial period of despair. — Paddy Chayefsky

Shakespeare had all these sonnets where what he said came down to this: Youth is fleeting and you'd better get married and have children and make a copy of the beauty you own because the world owns it too. — Elizabeth Knox

The War Sonnets: V. The Soldier
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. — Rupert Brooke

Oh, Philippe, thou are a rogue."
"So I have been told. Presumably because I am innocent of the slightest indiscretion. Curious. No one dubs you rogue who so fully merit the title. But I, whose reputation is spotless, am necessarily a wicked one and a deceiver. I shall write a sonnet on the subject."
"Ah, no!" begged Saint-Dantin in alarm. "Your sonnets are vile, Philippe! So let us have no more verse from you, I pray! — Georgette Heyer

I write quite a lot of sonnets, and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite. — Carol Ann Duffy

They think thee mad? I'll show thou mad, my lord. — Phar West Nagle

O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets! — Virginia Woolf

The public is absolutely fascinated by aging. They don't want to get old. And you can see - read Shakespeare. Read the sonnets. They're all about aging. — Cynthia Kenyon

Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change the limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible. — Alexander Chee

My beloved husband goes through radiation, and a book of sonnets is my passionate response. And then after he dies, I write another book of poems as a farewell. The two keywords here are passion and joy. I simply have a passion for writing, and I do it with joy. — Jane Yolen

Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, XII
Bless the spirit that makes connections,
for truly we live in what we imagine.
Clocks move along side our real life
with steps that are ever the same.
Though we do not know our exact location,
we are held in place by what links us.
Across trackless distances
antennas sense each other.
Pure attention, the essence of the powers!
Distracted by each day's doing,
how can we hear the signals?
Even as the farmer labors
there where the seed turns into summer,
it is not his work. It is Earth who gives. — Rainer Maria Rilke

It occurred to me that the moment in space and time before lips touch, the small exquisite sting of wanting, a beat of thirst, of yearning, was the most underrated part of kissing. There should be sonnets and epic poems written about the space before a kiss, and the thrilling rush that comes with the moment of contact. — Natasha Boyd

The Sonnets of Shakespeare have the fascination of an autobiography, without its clarity. It is like reading an important document in a cave by the light of matches which keep blowing out. — Gilbert Highet

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head. — Sylvia Plath

My friends, tonight we bring you something entirely different. Something special. The poets will rest, the sonnets will be silent, and what words of love there are will not be spoken. Tonight, my friends, and I can hear you out there, sitting alone, like me, in your chairs, your beds, driving down an empty street with no one but me to listen to your weeping; tonight, I'm going to bring you Armageddon. — Charles Grant

And aye, beside her stalks her amarous knight!
Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn,
And thro' those brogues, still tatter'd and betorn,
His hindward charms glean an unearthly white,
Ah! thus thro' broken clouds at night's high Noon
Peeps in fair fragments forth the full-orb'd harvest-moon! — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

If I had questioned Harris further - "What do you mean when you say sex doesn't have to mean anything? Do people engage in it for no reason at all? Does it just happen, like a gurgle in the stomach, a can rattling down the street, or a screen door blowing shut in the breeze?" - perhaps he would have conceded that sex does have trivial meanings: a little pleasure, a little fun, a little relief from boredom and desire. This wouldn't be much of a concession. Sex would mean something, but only in the way that eating a peanut means something, chewing on an ice cube means something, scratching an itch means something. There would be no more call to rhapsodize about the touch of a man and a woman than to compose sonnets about the communion of a picnicker with his mayonnaise. — J. Budziszewski

Quiet book-learning in monasteries and ethereal music, sonnets and courtly lovethat stuff is all fantasyand veneer? You couldn't afford to let the beauty of the thing seduce you too far or you forgot the truth and the truth was always hard as iron bloody bars. — Janice Galloway

Mr. Manzi stood at the bottom of the big, rickety old amphitheater, making blue flames and red flares and clouds of yellow stuff by pouring the contents of one test tube into another, and I shut his voice out of my ears by pretending it was only a mosquito in the distance and sat back enjoying the bright lights and the colored fires and wrote page after page of villanelles and sonnets. — Sylvia Plath

I am, and that is all I know at times,
My being shaped by forces known and not.
But whereas words are made to bend to rhymes,
My feet are bound to steps that I have wrought.

I feel myself expanding into this
Beautiful niche I could not see before
But I always sensed-and now I cannot miss
Myself: I am unlimited and more

Is opening to me, the more I open
To this sweet fear, like falling from a cloud,
My heart's inertia clear and calm, unspoken
But heard. It says to me: "You are allowed."

And I am free at last to feel this way
To take this step: to wonder, love and stray. — David Griswold

Silken strings composing the harpsichord of life accommodate a score of emotional tidings. An orchestra of linked heartbeats strumming the melodious prose of our collective intones gives rise to sonnets of melancholy, producing an illimitable libretto stretching from the milky dawn of newborn's amaranth life to the speckled sunsets of gentle souls whom we cherish. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Some say that Cusk has no sense of humour, but expecting giggles from this writer would be akin to expecting sonnets from Benny Hill. — Julie Burchill

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize. — Oscar Wilde

Don't they feed you at Navarre house?"
"They throw out some gruel between the indoctrination sessions and propaganda films. Then we're off marching around the grounds and the recitation of sonnets to Celina's loveliness. — Chloe Neill

A gaze to stop still, wonder at the shimmering depths.
A memory near the amygdala stored, an unforgettable tune,
Such an image did it impress, your sweet nostalgic scents. — Selina A. Mahmood

Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited. — Steve Earle

Want to talk about Shakespeare's sonnets?" asked Orphu of Io.
Are you shitting me?" The moravecs loved the ancient human colloquial phrases, the more scatological the better.
Yes," said Orphu. "I am most definitely shitting you, my friend. — Dan Simmons

A witty and informative professor posits that more authors do not choose titles borrowed from Shakespeare's sonnets and plays for the reason some people claim not to have partners: "All the good ones are taken." — Thomas C. Foster

I prefer formal techniques, and use sonnets and rhyme, any manner of scheme to give a shape and order-of feeling as well as argument-to a poem. But all my life, I've also been a person who's made his bed in the morning and picks up the bath mat. That's what I mean by temperament. Whether genetic or acquired, I have a disposition to arrangements. One is born with this, as if with blue eyes or a weak heart. Do you think Allen Ginsberg ever put the cap back on his toothpaste? — J. D. McClatchy

It's often assumed that British actors read Shakespeare and sonnets as we're going to bed at night and we're all very familiar with it. — Kate Winslet

Sweetheart, darling, dearest, it was funny to think that these endearments, which used to sound exceedingly sentimental in movies and books, now held great importance, simple but true verbal affirmations of how they felt for each other. They were words only the heart could hear and understand, words that could impart entire pentameter sonnets in their few, short syllables. — E.A. Bucchianeri

I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's. — Jack Prelutsky

Holy Sonnets: Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?"

Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste,
I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday;
I dare not move my dim eyes any way,
Despair behind, and death before doth cast
Such terror, and my feebled flesh doth waste
By sin in it, which it towards hell doth weigh.
Only thou art above, and when towards thee
By thy leave I can look, I rise again;
But our old subtle foe so tempteth me,
That not one hour I can myself sustain;
Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art,
And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart. — John Donne

What are the precise characteristics of an epigram it is not easy to define. It differs from a joke, in the fact that the wit of the latter dies in the words, and cannot therefore be conveyed in another language; while an epigram is a wit of ideas, and hence, is translatable. Like aphorisms, songs and sonnets, it is occupied with some single point, small and manageable; but whilst a song conveys a sentiment, a sonnet a poetical, and an aphorism a moral reflection, an epigram expresses a contrast. — William Matthews

I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them. Now that I have declared the foundations of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life. — Pablo Neruda

Then, were not summer's distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.
But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet. — William Shakespeare

With a sugared tongue I whispered goodnight,
Kissed your eyelids, and set thoughts to light. — Selina A. Mahmood

Snow-melt in the stream: Mama Nature turning winter's storms into nourishment for the soil, fecundity, and beauty. This is what I must now learn to do with the stormy weather I've been passing through: turn it into beauty, turn it into art, so new life can germinate and bloom.
One example of a creative artist who does this is my friend Jane Yolen, who wrote her exquisite book of poems The Radiation Sonnets while her husband was undergoing treatment for the cancer that would eventually claim his life. This is what all artists must do: take whatever life gives us and "alchemize" it into our art (either directly and autobiographically, as in Jane's book, or indirectly; whatever approach works best), turning darkness into light, spinning straw into gold, transforming pain and hardship into what J.R.R. Tolkien called 'a miraculous grace. — Terri Windling

Some of the books the Ministry's confiscated - Dad's told me - there was one that burned your eyes out. And everyone who read Sonnets of a Sorcerer spoke in limericks for the rest of their lives. And some old witch in Bath had a book that you could never stop reading! You just had to wander around with your nose in it, trying to do everything one-handed. And - "
"All right, I've got the point," said Harry. — J.K. Rowling

Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets. — Oscar Wilde

Elinor Lipman is to tweets what Shakespeare is to sonnets. — Firoozeh Dumas

There had been romances in my schooldays
but all my friends had had those; we were forever sending each other Valentines, writing sonnets on the prefect's eyes ... This wasn't like that. It was a thing of the heart and the head and the body. A real, true thing, grown-up. — Sarah Waters

He had the "Love-sonnets from the Portuguese" in mind as he wrote, and he wrote under the best conditions for great work, at a climacteric of living, in the throes of his own sweet love-madness. The — Jack London

Reading your sonnets?" asked Orphu. Mahnmut closed the book. "How'd you know? Have you taken up telepathy now that you've lost your eyes?" "Not yet," rumbled the Ionian. Orphu's great crab shell was lashed to the deck ten meters from where Mahnmut sat near the bow. "Some of your silences are more literary than others, is all. — Dan Simmons

Sonnets To Orpheus, Part Two, XII
Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.
What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.
Pour yourself like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.
Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I've seen many strange things in my work, my friend, but a wealthy lawyer who leaves everything to go write sonnets is not part of the repertoire.
-Ricardo Salvador — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Sometimes, when you are in a really constrained situation, it makes you more focused about what you want to say and where you're heading. The most beautiful love poems that were ever written are sonnets, composed in a very constraining form. — Etgar Keret

Even now, Dickon was upstairs, writing sonnets to his new love, while back at Seadown House, Marianne was writing 'Ella' on scraps of paper and then burning them. — Jessica Day George

I presented him with an African violet, which I saw as symbolically useful, though I'm not sure the others understood the subtleties. (African violets must be watered from the bottom, not the top, and this, I believe, is analogous to the writing of sonnets in the twenty-first century.) — Carol Shields

I strive for what you do find in Shakespeare's work - that there is a definite humanity and a definite character behind the writing in the sonnets, and it's very real because it's so deeply personal. I try to aspire to that in what I do. — Rufus Wainwright

I've stopped acting, but I don't think I've finished using my voice. I could, and probably will, record the whole of Shakespeare's sonnets. They live at the side of my bed and are my constant companions. — Peter O'Toole

Sonnet XII: There is a Meetinghouse across the wold

There is a Meetinghouse across the wold
Near shaded churchyard where pine breezes sigh;
Such sacred mem'ries gently here unfold
Of rustic folk whom 'neath the yew trees lie.
Engraved on stones now crum'ling in the earth,
Of souls asleep for o'er a hundred years,
Foretell unceasing cycles - Death and Birth
That yew tree nods and weeps her unseen tears.
But God shall guide us through the gloom of night
Victorious over grim reaper's blade,
As yet we grasp to see eternal light
Amidst life's fickle joys which here do fade.
Victims of Death by lusty scythe bannish'd
Triumphant wake to find nightmares vanish'd!

13 February, 2013 — Timothy Salter

Ah, but it wasn't just her lovely face that haunted him. Nor the soft, lush body he was increasingly desperate to see liberated from that woolen cocoon. It was the way she'd so willingly owned up to the truth. The way her spirit had sparked when he'd told her to put aside her art. The way she'd practically made sweet, innocent love to him with her eyes when he'd said he cared if she lived or died.
Good Lord. The laughable irony of it. He'd wasted weeks of his adolescence memorizing sonnets, spent years perfecting little murmured innuendos. Only to learn the most seductive phrase in the English language was something akin to: All things being equal, I'd rather not see you mauled by a shark. — Tessa Dare

Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?. — David Ogilvy

A sonnet might look dinky, but it was somehow big enough to accommodate love, war, death, and O.J. Simpson. You could fit the whole world in there if you shoved hard enough. — Anne Fadiman

Not even the tallest mountain of raccoon droppings could ever get in the way of my love for you.'
'That might be the most romantic thing you've ever said to me.'
'It's Shakespeare. One of the sonnets. — Gina Damico

I propose that English poetry and biology should be taught as usual, but that at irregular intervals, poetry students should find dogfishes on their desks and biology students should find Shakespeare sonnets on their dissecting boards. I am serious in declaring that a Sarah Lawrence English major who began poking about in a dogfish with a bobby pin would learn more in thirty minutes than a biology major in a whole semester; and that the latter upon reading on her dissecting board That time of year Thou may'st in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold - Bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang. might catch fire at the beauty of it. — Walker Percy

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose. — Shelby Foote

After vindictive winter, apple blossoms seem all the more heaven-sent.
Among flashing forsythia and budding rose, dogwood and daffodil,
The allure of magnolia, azalea and wisteria to lovers' dreams are lent.
Resolve is recompense as seedtime's blush dispenses with the chill,
How sweet-scented is New England now as winter tempests are through.
My darling girl, the divinest bloom in cherry blossom time just happens to be you. — David B. Lentz