[Aaron Poochigian]

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.

[Aaron Poochigian]

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.

[Orwn Acra]

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.)

[Susan McLean]

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

[Catherine Chandler]

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".

[Mary Meriam]

<<Shakespeare rolling in grave>>

[Robin Helweg-Larsen]

This is a very well-executed parody, worthy of Marcus Bales.

[David Danoff]

Life is unfair and swiftly it declines.
The Yuletide yew we hewed remains untrimmed

I think those lines are good, the first for pithiness and the second for sonics.

But the rest is a fairly weak repurposing, which (as others have been saying) doesn't do enough that's clever or unexpected.

[Jennifer Gordon]

First, thanks to aka Orwn Acra (sp?) for comparing said parodied sonnet of the Bard's with this pretty number.
After that, Shakespeare proved his love far beyond a summer's day, whereas this sonneteer seems content to merely liken the season invoked and former lover.
Other than that, I could wish it a tad more generous in differing with Shakespeare's but that seems rather peevish.
L7 introduces what follows, yet seems to stand alone as it cuts in after the flow of the previous lines.
If it's not rude, I beg to differ with the "impeccable craftsmanship" assessment, the flow rather choppy, which is typical of an amateur, the Bard being no exception.
Elsewise, this is a clever piece of work and I rather enjoyed its parody of sorts.