Sweet girls of youth

Shakespeare: 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.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st 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.

Lately I've been re-working (with no comparison possible or intended) some of Shakespeare's sonnets. Sonnet 18 led me to think of the girls of my youth, who seemed (or seem in retrospect) as glamorous and sweet-natured as the Hollywood goddesses I loved. These were the days (the 50's) before sex was political, when girls were rather proud to talk, behave and dress very differently from men; they were courteous even when saying No (as they mostly did, at least to me). I feel nostalgic towards them, while recognising that I'm seeing them partly mythologically; and also towards my own youthful, yearning, shy, lusting self. The mostly unattainable girls merged into my love of poetry, especially the Romantics.

In this re-working I set myself to preserve all of the end-words of the original - apart from slight adaptations (it wouldn't have been easy to write a modern poem with 'grow'st' or 'thee' in it). It created an extra, enjoyable challenge and, by providing set words as stepping-stones, helped me to write it.

Shall I compare you

Shall I compare you all to Doris Day?
You were as feminine and as temperate.
Your kisses lingered like the scent of May.
Sometime, but rarely on an early date,
You’d let me see your heavenly welts, the shine
Of clasps on straps, on soft flesh; but the dim
Recesses which those led to you’d decline
To show, although the hair you did not trim
Might possibly be felt…

But how it fades—
The memory of those girls to whom I owe
So much! They merely live as shades,
Like my young cock, that instantly would grow
Huge from a gleam of curves, wet from the sea,
While Keats or Shelley was entrancing me.