Today’s Totally Random
Lines
Celestial
as thou art, O, pardon love this wrong,
That
sings heavens’ praise with such an earthly tongue.
Nathaniel
Love’s Labour’s Lost Act IV, Scene ii, Line 124
Well
how about that. We’ve got a sonnet. But it is not one of the 154 sonnets. It is
a sonnet that is written into the play Love’s Labour’s Lost, and
these are the two concluding lines of this fourteen line sonnet.
I’m afraid I’m not inclined to type out the first
twelve lines. Of course, I’ve given you the act, scene, and line reference, and
there’s a tab at the top of this page that will take you right to the text of
Will’s plays. So there’s nothing stopping you from reading the sonnet, should
you feel so inclined.
Also, I’m not exactly sure what’s going on in the
play at this point, so I can’t tell you how this sonnet fits in to the story of
Love’s Labour’s Lost. And quite frankly, I’m not inclined to do
the work this morning of finding this out either.
So, assuming that you’re not going to read the
whole sonnet, we’re both going to be lazy; is that it? Well, it happens,
doesn’t it?
One further, somewhat unconnected but interesting (at least I thought it was interesting), thought: I was thinking (and typing), is’t possible to make a….full stop. FULL STOP! I had been about to type make a book out of the blog, with additional writing in it? But as I was typing right now, when it came to the word book I mis-typed and hit v instead of b and then o and Notes (the app I use when I’m writing on my phone) auto-filled that word as void. So my typing read - Is’t possible to make a void.
Now,
consider: I have, at times, thought of the blog as my Watts Tower. That is to
say, just some weird personal pursuit. But in the case of the Watts Towers it
ending up being something. In the case of this blog, is it nothing? Just a
void? A waste of part of my life?
That’s definitely a full stop thought. Oh auto-fill, you devil, you.
3 comments:
I think the line number is incorrect. I went to the act/scene/line and it was not the same line. I did ctr-f and it looks like it was line 113-114.
Also w.r.t this line:
"Though to myself forsworn, to thee I'll faithful prove:"
Do you reckon that means "I love myself most, but I'll still be an okay partner to you"? Very modern declaration.
This is most certainly not a waste of part of your life! What a terrible notion! The pursuit of one's loves and passions is never a waste. If that were true, would it be a waste for me to read a book? Would it be a waste to take a walk? Would it be a waste to talk to my dog for an hour? A waste is only that which is unnecessary and also does not bring joy. If I were to clean my rug with a toothbrush, that would be unnecessary and not bringing me joy. Hence, a waste.
Regarding the line #: There are a lot of discrepancies of different line #s from different sources where there is prose involved. A lot of this scene is written in prose, not verse, where the number of lines involved depends entirely on that particular publication. When it’s all blank verse it’s easy to count the lines and it’s fairly consistent. When there’s prose, it gets messy.
Oh. That's disconcerting.
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