Shall I Compare Thee to a Winter's Day?
 

Shall I compare thee to a winter's day?
Thou art more frigid and less temperate.
Rough winds do shake the windows where I stay
Alone in bed with no hope of a date.
The eye of heaven blinks and seldom shines,
His golden visage is forever dimmed.
Life is unfair and swiftly it declines.
The Yuletide yew we hewed remains untrimmed --
It will be sere by April, it will fade
As though it had been drying in an oast.
Death brags that thou art fondest of his shade
As is a well-known fact from coast to coast.
So long as I may breathe or my eyes see,
I'll rue the cold day I lay next to thee.

I was struck by “Shall I Compare Thee to a Winter’s Day?” because, in the act of parodying a very famous sonnet, it becomes its own poem. It could stand quite happily alone. The author deftly develops the hibernal imagery with the Yuletide yew and the rough winds shaking the windows. In keeping with its bleakness, the poem offers a bleak gnomic statement: “Life is unfair and swiftly it declines.” “Oast” is my favorite new-addition to my vocabulary. Apart from the necessary “thous” and “thees,” the author has effectively updated the idiom to the twenty-first century. The craftsmanship is impeccable, and the closing couplet is withering.

I don't consider it a parody. What element of the original does it parody? It uses the structure of the original and inverses the content, but does little else with it. The poem is competently written only because Shakespeare wrote it; in fact, it is so close to the original that I shall compare them:

Shall I compare thee to a winter's day?
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more frigid and less temperate.
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the windows where I stay
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
Alone in bed with no hope of a date.
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
The eye of heaven blinks and seldom shines,
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
His golden visage is forever dimmed.
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
Life is unfair and swiftly it declines.
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
The Yuletide yew we hewed remains untrimmed --
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
It will be sere by April, it will fade
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
As though it had been drying in an oast.
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Death brags that thou art fondest of his shade
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
As is a well-known fact from coast to coast.
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as I may breathe or my eyes see,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
I'll rue the cold day I lay next to thee.
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Give me a flawed but imaginative poem. Not this.

(I adore the look of "yew we hewed" though.)

This one is so close to a bouts-rimés that I almost wonder why the author didn't leave all of the rhymes intact in order to show how much the content could be changed without changing the rhymes. Though I can appreciate the charms of doing a 180-degree turn on a well-known sonnet, and I like some of the lines, especially "Life is unfair and swiftly it declines," I am left puzzled by the comment that the Yuletide yew will be dried out by April. That seems so obvious as not to be worth mentioning, even as a metaphor for the relationship. There are too few zingers in a poem that seems to be meant to be satirical.

Susan

Susan and Walter have mentioned my greatest reservations: (a) that it is more of a bouts-rimés and not a parody; and (b) it is unimaginative.

I agree with the DG that the craftsmanship (Shakespeare's) is impeccable, but disagree with him/her that the closing couplet is "withering".

<<Shakespeare rolling in grave>>

Too cinchy.

I was enjoying it until L12, which not only loses the perfection of using the original rhyme sounds but also seems like a gratuitous cliché. I wouldn't mind as much if it managed to work in 'grossed', even if it were more tortuously rhyme driven, because that is part of the fun. There are some excellent lines but not enough overall.

I think the poem is amusing and well done for what it is, but disappoints in the context a bake-off where we usually look for more ambitious efforts.

There are so many humorous possibilities left unexplored here that I'm uncertain whether this poem is intended as a joke or parody at all.

It seems to be an attempt at a serious poem about love/sex, simply shoehorned into the framework of a more famous poem about love/sex, on the theory that the recipe worked before. Several odd details seem to be there not for humorous incongruity or to play off the original, but simply because the author was methodically sticking to the recipe.

If I understand it correctly, N seems to be saying, "We cut down a Christmas tree together, but you died before we decorated it, so now I'm going to leave it up until it becomes a fire hazard in April, as tribute, even though my main sentiment upon your untimely demise is the crushing realization that now I have no hope of a date. In fact, I'm sorry I ever had sex with you at all, because now you've selfishly ditched me in order to go off with Death."

I think this poem would have be a lot more outrageous to telegraph the humor through my thick, logical skull. As is, I'm just saying, "Huh?"