Posted By BillHeise on May 22, 2010

Okay, I’ve been thinking about Medtextl all morning, and I thought I’d share with you one of my favorite moments on the list. [Be forewarned: I have added the sonnet itself, which was not in the original post]. The post was originally titled “Style Anecdote.”

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I have learned what little I know about style by copying others. My favorite story about learning style by imitation comes from my attempt to pick up the technique of balancing ideas by imitating Shakespeare’s sonnets. I wrote about twenty love sonnets in the course this experiment and carelessly left one lying out on my desk. My wife, the object of the sonnet’s praise, happened to pick it up and read it.

Should I contend with time and seek out fame
Through paeans to abstraction, I should lose
My life, my time, my labor, and my name.
For, timeless though abstraction is, who’d choose
To carry a man’s memory in their heart
For having shown them reason’s cold domain?
No, I have found the subject of my art
Through loving her with whom my thoughts remain
Through labor, time, and living, fixed before
My eyes, as though she tarried with me there
And could be kissed a hundred times or more,
While solid things melt into liquid air.
I would force time’s surrender in this way:
Forfeiting time a thousand times a day.

When I got home, she wanted to know who had written it, since she had looked in a first line index of Shakespeare’s sonnets and not found it. Now, it’s one thing to imitate Shakespeare, but quite another to be mistaken for Shakespeare. The head began to swell. Perhaps I momentarily dreamed of leaving the workaday world for a lucrative life in poetry.

I told her proudly that none other than I myself had written this love poem in her honor. I waited for the accolades and gratitude that would follow. She read the poem again and was immediately recalled to her sense of spousal duty, saying ‘Yes, now when I read it I can see all the flaws.’ The head deswelled, as if on command. Such is the nature of romance in the Heise household.

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