Growing more comfortable in my nerdiness, I have been spending my recent old age studying Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. This odd hobby is an outgrowth of my decision not to read anything new until I’ve finished reading and/or re-reading all the things I was supposed to read as a high-school student and/or college English major but somehow never did, or did but didn’t understand or appreciate them, or managed to forget what they were all about.
It started a few years ago with my husband’s talking me into reading “Moby Dick,” a book whose title was carved into many a desk as part of students’ universal jack-knife advice on what not to read. But when I finally did read it, at my own leisurely pace and with no tests to face, I loved it. And so I have plunged ahead into the works of everyone from William Blake to Carson McCullers, Dostoyevsky to Vonnegut. Now I am reading, for the first time, the Sonnets.
And you know what? Something’s weird! How come so many sonnets express in so many different ways the poet’s passion for a man? And so many others directly nag, like a classic Jewish mother, his (expressly male) subject to hurry up and get married, already? And how come so many of them seem to be “doublets,” where one has the exact same subject, style, attitude and voice, and uses the same metaphors, as the one just before it? I am fantasizing that old Will had a contest with a pal: Who can write the better sonnet about how “thinking on you” can rescue the poet from the depths of misery? Who can write the better one about Cupid getting his arrow (“brand,” he called it) stolen by a virgin while he slept? And so on. I’m certainly enjoying delving into this.
But here’s the first thing that jumped right out at me: For sheer, low-rent sarcasm expressing how the writer is so enamored of his gal that he’s like her “slave,” just waiting around to do her bidding while she, apparently, doesn’t know or care if he exists, Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 57” falls a distant second to the Statler Brothers’ “Flowers on the Wall,” the great country song written in 1962 or so by Lew DeWitt of Staunton, Va.
Hear me out. Here’s Shakespeare: “Being your slave, what should I do but tend/ Upon the hours and times of your desire?/ I have no precious time at all to spend,/ Nor services to do, till you require.” Here’s DeWitt: “Countin’ flowers on the wall/ That don’t bother me at all/ Playin’ solitaire till dawn/ With a deck of 51/ Smokin’ cigarettes and watchin’ Captain Kangaroo,/ Now don’t tell me/ I’ve nothin’ to do…”
Shakespeare: “Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour/ Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you…” DeWitt: “So please don’t give a thought to me/ I’m really doin’ fine,/ You can always find me here/ I’m havin’ quite a time…”
Well, I could go on, but for my money, DeWitt wins that matchup, hands down.
Running score: Statler Brothers 1, Shakespeare 0. I’ll keep you updated.
