After Hours

Sonnet 18

January 25, 1971

"All of you would have to be a little daft if you didn't know who William Shakespeare was and honestly I would question the need for some of you to procreate if you didn't know."

A few stifled giggles echoed throughout the room.

"Now, as you know we're starting Hamlet this week. We will do some reading in class but most of it will be on your own." Jane grabbed the stack of books off of her desk and passed them out around the classroom. Some of the students were eager to read it while others rolled their eyes and groaned as Jane placed the book on their desk. She made her way back to the front of the classroom, retrieving another stack of papers. "Shakespeare didn't just write plays, what other sorts of things did he write?"

She looked around before seeing a few hands raise, Jane motioned to one of the students in the back row, "Poetry?" He asked timidly.

"Exactly! I'm glad you read my mind, I'm going to give all of you a poem that he wrote so we can discuss it."

Thus she began the routine of passing out the photocopied pages from an anthology in the school library. After finishing, she returned to the front of the classroom and sat on her desk.

"Shakespeare wrote one hundred and fifty four sonnets that were all originally published together in 1609, we're going to start with one that is probably his most famous. You'll recognize it from the first line,"

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 dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime 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 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.

"What do we gather from this?"

"The author is comparing her love to a summer's day because he's hot?"

A few chuckles scattered throughout the class,

"Kind of, but it's a bit deeper than that. Read through and focus on the second half of the sonnet. The first line sets up the rest of the poem, the next eleven compare the Fair Youth to that summers day. In the second line, the speaker stipulates what differentiates the young man from a summer's day, that he's more lovely and more temperate."

Jane began to have a flash of a special someone enter her mind as soon as she said 'more lovely and more temperate', she thought those exact things about him.

She cleared her throat and continued on, "Um.. on the surface, the poem is simply a statement of how beautiful this person is. The next few lines discuss the characteristics of a typical day during the summer. It tends to have unpleasant winds and heat, but the beloved is always mild and temperate. Summer is personified as 'the eye of heaven' with its 'gold complexion'. The imagery isn't too flowery, forgive my pun, compared to the other Sonnets which we'll be reading throughout the week."

"What about the next lines, what do they mean?" A student in the front row asked.

"The rest of the poem has an important theme to it, in the seventeen sonnets before, the speaker encourages the young man to procreate to carry on his beauty for future generations to enjoy such as our speaker has. This is the first one to not explicitly state that, this is our speaker's first attempt to encapsulate his beauty forever. As we know, seasons come and go, as much as we don't want them to. The speaker is attempting to defy time, to keep the beloved's eternal summer from fading and it never will because now it's set into this sonnet for the rest of time."

"Mrs. West, why would you want to set that in stone? Don't you want to grow old with someone? Isn't that the goal of marriage?" Another student asked.

"Yes, the goal is find someone who's willing to tolerate your quirks and shortcomings for the rest of their lives and still love you even through that. It is nice to have something like this to remember their beauty at a youthful time in your lives. Just like anyone keeps souvenirs from holidays or letters from a significant other, a close friend or family member. It's a physical way to keep a specific memory, day, or how your beloved looked from an earlier point in your relationship frozen in time."

Her mind remembered the various mementos that kept her own beloved set in time forever. The picture on her bookshelf, the happy birthday dedication. Ever since they reconnected, she couldn't get out of her mind how beautiful he was, it may have not been in the conventional sense but he was. She never could find a single flaw about him, he may have had his quirks but that's what made him so very special to her. She wished she could keep him this way forever, that he would never grow old. Jane wanted him to stay the way he was when she first fell in love with him.

No, you can't be feeling this way about him..

"Have you ever been in love, Mrs. West?" One of the young ladies that sat in the back corner spoke up, as the question lingered, Jane was at a loss for words. Her gut reaction was to say no, it always had been.

She realized he had always been the one, the only person she had ever loved and who made her feel loved. Jane may have not known it in their youth but she did. She told herself she'd never fall in love, there was no way that she'd fall in love because there was no one else who came close to how she felt about Brian or how he treated her. As much as she didn't want to admit it, she had unknowingly compared everyone she had been involved with romantically to him. She couldn't feel this way about somebody, especially not someone who she considered her best friend, the person who knew her as well as she knew herself.

"Yeah.. I think so."