let me introduce you to some poetry...

Yes, I have been reading poetry for a good portion of this evening. I don't think you will doubt me when you are done reading this post, if you even read all of it. After having a grand time jumping on the trampoline, eating stuff, and feebly attempting to do homework, among other things, at the Kesslers with my roommates and other CORPS people, I started reading stuff for a paper I am supposed to write on this sonnet by Shakespeare (wow that's a long sentence):


Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lover's eyes.

I think he is being a bit presumptuous here. I agree that poetry is probably a better monument than stone, but he ends up actually praising poetry (and thus indirectly himself) instead of whoever he fleetingly mentions as being the subject of the sonnet. We don't even know who it is or what she's like (most people assume it is a woman). Quite by accident I stumbled upon someone else who feels as I do, Archibald MacLeish. He is harsher than I am (maybe because he's a better writer :-)) but his point is much the same. Here is his poem with the same title:

"Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments"
by Archibald MacLeish
The praisers of women in their proud and beautiful poems,
Naming the grave mouth and the hair and the eyes,
Boasted those they loved should be forever remembered:
These were lies.

The words sound but the face in the Istrian sun is forgotten.
The poet speaks but to her dead ears no more.
The sleek throat is gone -- and the breast that was troubled to listen:
Shadow from door.

Therefore I will not praise your knees nor your fine walking
Telling you men shall remember your name as long
As lips move or breath is spent or the iron of English
Rings from a tongue.

I shall say you were young, and your arms straight, and your mouth scarlett:
I shall say you will die and none will remember you:
Your arms change, and none remember the swish of your garments,
Nor the click of your shoe.

Not with my hand's strength, not with difficult labor
Springing the obstinate words to the bones of your breast
And the stubborn line to your young stride and the breath to your breathing
And the beat to your haste
Shall I prevail on the hearts of unborn men to remember.

(What is a dead girl but a shadowy ghost
Or a dead man's voice but a distant and vain affirmation
Like dream words most)

Therefore I will not speak of the undying glory of women.
I will say you were young and straight and your skin fair
And you stood in the door and the sun was a shadow of leaves on your shoulders
And a leaf on your hair --

I will not speak of the famous beauty of dead women:
I will say the shape of a leaf lay once on your hair.
Till the world ends and the eyes are out and the mouths broken
Look! It is there!


And then there's me, who cares not if you remember me, or whoever praises me in poetry (not that there's been anyone yet!), but that you remember the reason I live: my Savior, Christ Jesus the Lord! Forget Shakespeare. To Christ be the glory forever. Somehow that would not fly with my English professor, though, so I must get back to work.