William Shakespeare is believed to have died on April 23, 1616. Post your commemorative poems in the comments section or email to [email protected].
Remembering Shakespeare
By Dusty Grein
The Bard of Avon gave us many gifts.
An actor, true, but he was so much more;
A poet of renown and dramatist,
He bestowed plays and sonnets by the score.
A poet’s heart inside his soul did burn
In words of iambs, five across in verse.
Both comedies and tragedies in turn,
He penned, great works that actors still rehearse.
William Shakespeare has now become a name
That’s taught in school, along with all his rhymes.
His writing has become his claim to fame.
Four hundred years–it’s stood the test of time.
Around the world we keep his memory,
Immortal now, “To be or not to be.”
A 52 year old grandfather, Dusty has just recently become a professional author. He lives in Newberg, Oregon, where a dog named Naked, and his youngest daughter Jazzmyn keep him busy.
Composed Upon the 400th Anniversary of His Death: April 23, 2016
Shall I compare his language to a grave?
It is more lively and more flowery.
His rough-shook words refuse to be death’s slave.
No tomb’s as showy or so showery.
A sepulchre, though hard as rock, erodes,
and shrines do often lose their lustre’s prime,
while monuments, though nice, make poor abodes,
and sadly catacombs decay in time.
But Shakespeare’s language will not go away.
Unceasingly, his lines play in the mind.
They pop up even on a summer’s day.
Unlike a crypt, they will not stay behind.
Alas, poor Oracle, his song goes on,
despite all efforts of oblivion.
He also coined many of the words we use today…about 1700 by some estimates…
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/2012/how-the-english-language-is-shakespeares-language/
Finally, I get to see a lovely portrait of ‘The Bard.’ I must have seen it before, but I just feel so much more comfortable looking at this portrait! Maybe it’s because of my notions, but I think it’s just splendid.
More and more he saw the underlying
purposes of Shakespeare’s world view, Weltbild,
its color, its shape, its morbid dyeing,
its composite of blood-lust and awful-guilt;
and though he himself did not prescribe just
such a view, still, he freely acknowledged
the extraordinary powerful thrust
of those dark scarlets that stilted Coleridge,
that Nietzsche, in his usually confused
and yet somewhat perceptive state, had called:
“Moorish-Saxon taste that would have amused
Aeschylus and his crowd, and left them galled.”