Twenty Ten…

Approaching six thousand readers. Thank you for reading. OK maybe three thousand are me, but that still leaves 3,000. Why that’s the capacity crowd of the Globe Theater. The old one then.

It is a commonplace of blogs to mourn the lack of readership. But then why do it? It is because you read and that, dear readers, is an ephemerally dangerous thing for both of us.

Reading exposes you to ideas. Any one of those ideas can change your life. Alternatively those ideas can confirm what you already know, or think you know.

Some people don’t like to read, others’ fetishise it. Some like fiction some like non-fiction. Some like fantasy, others’ reality.

Not everyone likes to write. Writing is confrontational. The writer is the most tortured of all souls. Total gules!

‘Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?

(now tell me the writer didn’t think about that word ‘variation’ ie 3 or 4 syllables followed by
‘quick change’ a synonym for what he just said)?

Why with the time do I not glance aside,
To new found methods and to compounds strange?

(Surely this a statement of how the writer sees his own writing style. Similar to the advice Hamlet gives to the actors)?

Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed?

(I see an anagram of “Hey, I is Will, not Vere” in that first line.
Could Sh be advocating smoking of da herb here ‘in a noted weed’)?

That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?

(Note the rime word ‘pro-ceed’ with ‘weed’! Sh was ‘for-seeds’! Meaning he was a grower. “Let me grow” is hidden in anagram in these lines)!

O know sweet love I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument:

(A perennial argument for poets and musicians, as the rock band The Who would ask centuries later: who are YOU)?

So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent.

(So words are like fashion, clothing his poem with old and new,
and as is usual with spendthrifts, bankrupting him)?

For as the Sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.

(Are you telling us or asking us? Does this mean you’re going shopping again? Can I have my credit card back)?

you can find this sonnet here