know, he rhymed her eyes with life and death:
“Thru Time I’ll save my love!” he said... yet Beauty
vanished with his breath, and, with her lovers, she was dead...
—Ever his wit and not her eyes, ever his art and not her hair:
“Who’d learn a trick in rhyme, be wise and pause before his
sonnet there”... So all my words, however true, might sing
you to a thousandth June, and no one ever know that you were
Beauty for an afternoon.
So he wrote one day, when he pondered how coldly we thought of the “Dark Lady of the Sonnets,” and how little we remembered her as the great man wanted her remembered. For what Shakespeare must have desired, to have been able to write with such divine despair, was that the lady should live... and now we have no real interest in her.... The irony of it is tha
