Work Text:
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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.
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest 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."
At the sound of those words, a memory from the past floated across Nick's mind. An English literatures teacher he had had in high school opened the first day of classes with that poem. And these words:
"Sonnet 18. Written by a man, for a man. Thoughts?"
Nick was quick to answer; telling the class he thought it was beautiful. No one else seemed to agree. In fact, Nick took some harsh criticism from his classmates for his analysis. Later, in passing, he heard some of them utter a few demeaning words he could only assume were directed at him. He promptly dropped English literatures and took up science. There were, after all, no emotions involved in science.
"But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest 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."
All these years later as he lay beside Greg, who, in a whisper recited those same lines, Nick knew he had been right. Written by a man, for a man, it was a beautiful poem.
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