Hump day of finals week

Two more finals tomorrow (and another last final on Friday), but I also have a term paper due tomorrow on top of the two finals  L  I really wish there were federal bans on term papers (and on 8 a.m. finals) already.  Today’s sonnet:

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XCVI

  Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonness;

  Some say thy grace is youth and gentle sport;

  Both grace and faults are lov'd of more and less:

  Thou mak'st faults graces that to thee resort.

  As on the finger of a throned queen

  The basest jewel will be well esteem'd,

  So are those errors that in thee are seen

  To truths translated, and for true things deem'd.

  How many lambs might the stern wolf betray,

  If like a lamb he could his looks translate!

  How many gazers mightst thou lead away,

  if thou wouldst use the strength of all thy state!

    But do not so; I love thee in such sort,

    As, thou being mine, mine is thy good report.

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Lines 1 and 2 constitute an oxymoron, so what if they are two whole lines instead of being a single word  J  And the both at the beginning of the third line is a volta that exploits the oxymoron in those first two lines  J  The parallel structure of the third quatrain reminds me of this famous stanza from Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,

         The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:

Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,

         And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

However, Shakespeare does it even better, using non-falsifiable speech instead of Gray’s indicatives.  The main volta is the but at the beginning of the closing couplet … In a regular “monolithic” poem, the closing usually needs to be the most powerful part.  I think one of the best features of the sonnet form is this:  An good volta can, in addition to everything else it does, also shift the power any “fireworks” from the first part—such as the third quatrain in today’s sonnet—over to the second part.  This is a complex effect!  More tomrrow (that term paper’s due at 6 p.m. tomorrow, and then there’s a final during 6–10 p.m. tomorrow)—