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Contact: Dr BSM Murty, H-701, Celebrity Gardens, Sushant Golf City, Ansal API, Lucknow:226030 (UP), India / Mob : +91-7752922938 (WApp) / 7985017549/ bsmmurty@gmail.com

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Shadow Sonnets Series

 

The following sonnets are a part of a poetic experiment by me. Each of them emanates from the first line of some of the famous sonnets written by the masters of the form. This experiment is a part of a book I am compiling on the Sonnet. More about this exercise can be read in my POETICA series of articles published on this blog. Comments are welcome. (The eleventh one here is an 'Echo Sonnet' inspired by some great poems/poets.)

16.  To me fair friend you never can be old  

 

To me fair friend you never can be old

Your plump curves and your silky swells,

Your sweet rosy lips, your hair of gold,

Your honeyed torso - like a garden smells.

 

Your youth transfixes the sun, and the moon

Goes circling round your svelte waist

The waves of the ocean come surging soon

To kiss your glowing feet, sprightly and chaste.

 

A thing of beauty, you are to me a joy forever

Vivid and fadeless like the bard’s perennial urn

My beauty in marble, from my verses you’ll never

Be absent, nor away from my fancy you’ll ever turn.

 

Your beauty and youth are an everlasting tale

That will keep my verse forever on sail.

 

[Shadow : Shakespeare Sonnet 104]

 

 

15.Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day

 

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely, more sultry in your looks,

With winking eyes, and lips burning like May,

Singing a love-song in murmur like the brooks.

 

The summer in your being mixes memories of the spring

With autumn filling all fruits with ‘ripeness to the core’

The splendor of all seasons in your person unveiling

The full lyricism of love in bouts of passion more.

 

The summer’s blazing sun shall hide behind the hills,

And the spring shall shut its shop of flowers soon

As autumn with its ‘twittering swallows’ the skies fills

While your radiant beauty walks past the luminous moon.

 

It will flourish and glow in these verses of mine

Eternally, as the bard said, it will continue to shine. 

 

[Shadow : Shakespeare Sonnet 18]

 

 

14.My mother moon   

 

It was a narrow oblong single door
Room with seven pairs of shoes outside
The door, and a thin grass mat on the floor
Of that room that was hardly eight feet wide.

It was my father’s workplace that lay at the end
Of a large hall, its width equal to the length
Of that narrow room where I’d often spend
Motherless hours of my childhood’s seventh

 

Year, drawing pictures of my smiling mother moon

Showering her love as I slept in my father’s fold

Lost in her dreams as she would vanish soon –

After kissing my cheeks - into her own world.

 

I could not see her but felt her presence always near

And though invisible she’d keep me in good cheer.

 

[Truly mine]

 

 

13. How do I love thee

 

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I think the first moment was when our eyes met

Abashed I lower my gaze its love as it says

And when you steal my kisses as I would let.

 

And then it was a merry-go-round, a hide-and-seek

Long separations followed by passionate embrace

With pulsating hearts and our faces cheek by cheek

Attaining a union of our loving souls in good grace.

 

It was a union of souls much before of flesh and blood

Those surges of the ocean’s waves on the pebbled shore

The retreats being equally sweet in that turbulent flood

And the more it swelled and rolled, it asked for more.

 

And swell and roll it will as the sun pursues the moon

In a never ending chase, in my verse, late and soon.

 

                                          - [Shadow: E. B. Browning]

 

 

12.Remembrance

 

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought                                                

Surge memories of those happy days and times

Of golden embraces and honeyed kisses hot,

And those wild passionate games in all climes.

 

A deep inscrutable yearning for those days gone by

Batters my heart, those silvern days and golden nights,

Echoed in heart’s flaming whispers every time it’ll sigh

Your name, and those moments of enrapturing heights.

 

These sessions of blissful dreaming then turn momentarily

Into moments of ‘embalmed darkness’ in ‘verdurous glooms’,

When I fly ‘on the viewless wings of poesy’, murmuringly

Singing of my anguish of separation as my heartache blooms.

 

Such disunion thus is a double boon bringing sweet suffering

And your sweet memories through my verses’ offering.

 

[Shadow : Shakespeare Sonnet 30]

11. How to pray

Tell me how to pray, or what to pray for -

O God, Who gave me all when You sent me

Into this world, the manifestation of Your

Glory infinite, with a lighted soul to see

 

And experience Your Lovingkindness

And Your Grace with every breath I take

But slowly I became aware of the harness

Tying me in desires prompting me to make

 

Entreaties for their fulfilment through prayers

Without knowing how or what to pray for

Save me, O God, from the intriguing snares

Of desires, and only let me remember You more.

 

Rid me of all want and ‘repining restlessness’

Only grant me rest and peace in Your Holiness.

       [Echo Sonnet: Ref. ‘The Pulley’ by George Herbert]

 

 10. Let’s kiss and part

 

Since there’s no help, come, let’s kiss and part;

The most delicious kiss ever our lips savoured.

This short separation can never keep us apart,

Through twenty springs our love’s persevered.

 

Separation only makes love deeper and sweeter

Unseen the bees keep the honeycomb enriching

Bringing the nectar of memories from far and near

To add to the liquid love ripening and mellowing.

 

Longing love at both ends, pining for an ultimate union

A candle burning at both ends melting to come closer

Till the two passionate souls find their communion

Defying all worldly impediments, heeding love’s prayer.

 

Against all obstacles invincible your love has ever been

Indeed, our short separation makes our love evermore keen. 

                                             [Shadow : Michael Drayton]

 

 9. Your epitaph

Or I shall live your epitaph to make

I knew the voice, resonant and hoarse,

Crossing oceans, incoherent as you spake,

A voice soon to lose its breath and force.

 

All that rich treasure of ripened wisdom,

Those secret stories, hilarious anecdotes, all

In evenings masquerading as mornings come

Conjoining time with space around nightfall.

 

Those eloquent quotes of Keats and Shelley

Pulled out like pigeons from an old frayed hat

Unforgettable memoirs that entertained most surely

Gripping tales like the Ancient Mariner’s, in fact.

 

The obituary, the stone-carved epitaph would hardly

Recreate the greatness of life, if ever, rather poorly.

[Shadow : Shakespeare Sonnet 81]

 

 8. Time’s scythe                                            

 

When I do count the clock that tells the time -

I shake to see the long hand outpacing the small,

And Herrick’s daffodils blooming in their clime,

Drooping fast to decay much before nightfall.

 

Childhood like Herbert’s spring - a box of sweets,

And even youth barely ‘an hour or half’s delight’,

Then a long, cold winter an aging body depletes

With a short hand, Time’s scythe cuts all with its might.

 

I know, my Love, it will not spare your radiant glow,

All your swelling, heaving treasures, those crimson lips,

Those golden supple arms, the small moving hand will mow

With its sickle - those raven tresses, doe-like eyes, fulsome hips.

 

Yet touch it cannot the expanse of our love; that will outpace

Time’s clock in my verse forever, like the moon - your face.

[Shadow : Shakespeare Sonnet 12 ]

 

 

7. Farewell                  

 

Farewell! You are too dear for my possessing,

I knew from the day you stood at your window

With glowing sun-kissed cheeks that winter morning

Your ruby lips, your auburn hair, your eyes of a doe.

 

That balcony glimpse soon turned into a sweet flower

In my palm, filling my soul with blissful fragrance; as if

In a swoon, I was oblivious of Time’s ceaseless devour.

It became a make-believe world of pleasures and mischief.

 

My precious possession, I always hid in my inmost heart,

I knew you will be there enclosed in love till it keeps beating,

Then in a dream I saw a glittering star aloft, like my sweetheart!

It was my priceless jewel stolen, I knew below, as I lay panting.

 

Thus have I had you - as a dream - like a star in the sky,

As my life of loneliness for me remains my only alibi.

[Shadow : Shakespeare Sonnet 87 ]

 

 

6. Surging Time                                          

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,

So does Time surge forward like a late running train,

It hurries earth’s seasonal roundtrip, pushing it more

From joyful spring and hot summer to loitering rain.

 

Time is a thief stealing joyous nights from newly-weds,

It’s a magician making larkish childhood vanish into air,

But lengthens sorrowful days to interminable spreads

Though breeding lilacs in April in a wasteland bare.

 

But on the pebbled shore of life it’s firmly pushed back

Every time it puffs and foams, with all its rolling waves,

By the playful children, the love-locked couple, who never lack

The zeal, the passion to punish time however it behaves.

 

My verse, I hope, withstands the surging waves of Time,

Even if it defies all poetic devices including rhyme.

[Shadow : Shakespeare Sonnet 60 ]

 

 5.Shakespeare’s Mirror

 

My glass shall not persuade me I am old

It has always beguiled me, made me believe –

I’m always less or more than what they hold

Though I always wear my face on my sleeve.

 

Mirrors are clever dissemblers all the time

Turning your left cheek mole curiously on right

Enwrinkling soft-cheeked maidens still in prime

Gainsaying all that they say, or may or might.

 

Let my glass belie; with my beloved in my arms

It can never dissuade me of my eternal youth

With me sipping her nectar lips, as my bed she warms,

And playing all our luscious games of the mouth.

 

The glass will only distort reality, most of all love,

So let’s forget it for good, all its mischief to prove.

[Shadow : Shakespeare Sonnet 22 ]

 

 

4.To the Bard of Avon       

 

Who will believe my verse in time to come

Even those few who ever chance to read

Or those fewer still who will care to plumb

Its shallow depths, after I am gone and dead

 

To an afterlife of namelessness and oblivion.

My verses are few and far between and flimsy;

They have been noticed scarcely by anyone

Worthy only of being buried with my memory.

 

A few may read them and fewer believe them,

Though my poems echo my diastole and systole;

The gurgle in my valves from where they stem

And their pulses can be heard afar sublimely.

 

But what of the critics, even the listless glancer

Would toss them off as worthless pitter-patter!

[Shadow : Shakespeare Sonnet 17 ]

 

3.To Wordsworth                                             

 

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Weighing us down with its burdensome weight

Of getting and spending, of selfishness and hate,

Driving us with its din and bustle to a near swoon.

 

Wrapped in cares and wishes, we won’t see the moon

Shining through the elm’s branches beyond our gate,

Nor see the shimmers in the fountain it will create,

Lost in worldly matters we miss all Nature’s boon.

 

Nature gives us free all its gifts of wind and rains

Of flowers and plants and fruit-bearing trees

Limpid streams murmuring songs of mountains

A morning full of twittering birds and buzzing bees

Yet as our life’s bane we are tied in the chains

Of our wild desires and miss life’s peace and ease.

 

2. On Keats                                                            

 

When I have fears that I may cease to be       

Like Keats who suffered it rather too early,    

And which proved so true, as it does for me,  

Who has achieved so little in the pearly          

 

World of letters, my fears darken so deep       

Like the darkeness of a moonless night,         

And I pray to God to bless me to keep            

My unfulfilled promises that give me such fright.

 

Let me O God, Who gave me so long a life,    

Fulfil as many of my promises that remain       

Unfulfilled, so at your door in my afterlife       

I come unburdened of all my baggage of pain. 

 

Life itself is the greatest gift for man, God said     

Whatever promises you kept, are your wages paid.

 

1.To Shakespeare

 

No longer mourn for me when I am dead

For I lived for nought, a life of no meaning,

Filled with sage books half of them unread

And those read were mostly page-turning.

 

Yea, I did tread through the seven ages of life,

A playful childhood, a wild and lusty youth,

A family of children and a most loving wife,

An old age laden with pain and aches, in truth.

 

Just as millions of lives played out around me,

Rumpled pages in a dust bin to be thrown out,

I, too, was like a drained ball point that would be

Discarded as trash in life’s turning roundabout.

 

Mine will also be a life forgotten as soon as gone

A life in which nothing worthwhile could be done.

                            [Shadow : Shakespeare Sonnet 71]

 

© Dr BSM Murty

Images : Courtsey Google

 

Please read POETICA-10 on ‘Poetry of Sonnets’ on this blog by clicking on SEARCH and writing POETICA-10. You may also click on ARCHIVE and go to any blogpost by year.  The POETICA series (1-10) is a continuing discussion on poetry writing today. You may please record your comment in the comment box. You may also read my currently written poems on Global Literary Society or Global Poet & Poetry sites on Facebbook.