Monday 20 June 2011

Shakespeare in the nude

When I start poetizing about nudity then you should know I do take the matter of the bare skin very seriously! I felt so inspired that I took one of Shakespeare's famous sonnets and transcribed it into this:

Let me not in the necessity for clothes
Succumb to illusion. Nude is not nude
When it covers the uncoverable,
Or colours the contours to recontour:
Oh no, it is an ever-fixed state,
That looks on shame, and is never shaken;
It is the compass to all bodies,
Whose senses are challenged yet sharpened.
Nude's not society's fool, though erotic mounds
Keep coming under the knife of moral scrutiny;
Nude deceives not in the face of exposure,
But bares it all till shame loses its name.
If nude be proved as a true right of skin,
We will be forever redeemed from this so-called sin

The original Shakespeare (Sonnet 116):

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with this brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

1 comment:

  1. This is a stunning re-imagining of Shakespeare's sonnet, so cleverly reflecting the Shakespearian word play. Clothes were an important trope in Shakespeare's great plays, but especially in Lear, in which the innocuous sounding line "Robes and furred gowns hide all" carries a grat ddeal of weight, as also the core image of man as the "bare forked animal". Separately, but on the theme of clothes, I love this little piece of nothing from Herrick: "Whenas in silks my Julia goes/Then, then methinks/How sweetly flows/The liquefaction of her clothes.

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