Day 18---and Alice Munro! :)

The famous Sonnet Eighteen  J

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XVIII

  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 ow'st,

  Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

  When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,

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

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

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A universal favorite  J  Had this been a normal week, I’d have written ad nauseam about it, too … but because it isn’t a normal week, I’m only writing about the volta:  The third quatrain is really posing a riddle, so the but at the beginning of line 9 is *not* a volta.  The closing couplet is resolving that riddle, and the volta is the and this in the last line.

Two easy sonnets in a row (yesterday and today)  J

In other news:  When Herta Müller won the Nobel Prize in 2009, my friend encouraged me to read Atemschaukel, even though I’d only had two years of German at that time (I did, and then I was glad I’d done it  J).  With Alice Munro, there’s finally another Nobel Prize winner—after four years!—whose work I can read in the original  J