Waypoints and Words by Thomas Fideler

Articles

A journal of commentary, narrative and poetry about navigating through life

ne 19, 2003

So Long Lives This

There is a measure and sense of immortality in the written word. When a memory, a feeling, an expression of love and passion, a moment in time, is captured in words, it gains a life of its own, often enduring long after the writer and the subject. A clear example of this is found in Shakespeare's Sonnet 18; it is a stirring expression of a woman's beauty. And he not only extols her beauty but also effectively illustrates how this written form can, quite literally, provide a measure of immortality. His beautifully composed sonnet follows below:

                  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 owest;

Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

  So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

  So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."

- William Shakespeare

Her "eternal Summer shall not fade," he boldly claims; neither shall she lose possession of her fairness nor shall she see death. And so it is, some 400 years after William penned these words we still enjoy a measure of her beauty like a Summer's day, because, as he states so well: "So long as men can breath, or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee." The "this" to which he refers, is this very sonnet within which her beauty remains, untouched by time¾and which we with breath and eyes, still enjoy. Is it any wonder that God said, "In the beginning was the word..."?

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