Thursday, February 02, 2006

Silent Poetry Reading

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times’ waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.

--Sonnet 30, William Shakespeare

You follow enough links around the 'net, you find something you might like to do. Today, that something, for me, is Reya's Bloggers (Silent) Poetry Reading. In a nutshell, you put a poem in your blog on February 2. Since I am a poetry editor in my spare time, how could I resist joining in?

I discovered this poem on a greeting card when I was in college. (I still have the card somewhere.) Of course, at 21, I didn't have a lot of old woes or grievances forgone, but I just knew that, someday, every line of the poem would resonate with me. Now, I don't claim to wallow in self-pity - quite the opposite - but I do believe that the companionship of good people can make one happier. Shakespeare, fortunately, said it much better than I just did, and it is always my pleasure to share his words with others.

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