When You Are Old (Shakespearean Sonnet)

marlyncabrera (70)in #poetry • 6 years ago (edited)

Listen! Listen to your old men because they know better. A boy grows to be old and finds himself to be an old child.

Anciano enseñando a leer a un niño, atribuido a Antonio de Puga (1640) - Imagen del Dominio Público (Wikimedia Commons)

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When You Are Old

                      When you are old, it means you have outpaced
                      the fogginess that chases younger days,
                      and one by one those terrors you’ve amazed
                      and have them sit and wait to see your grace.

                      When you are old, some say you’ve seen it all.
                      They say you’ve cracked the secret of the spheres,
                      and had your time to learn to never fall,
                      and had your chance to beat to death your fears.

                      Is it that we’ve become that wise indeed,
                      as to find solace and redemption ever?
                      Then what’s the quest abandoned by my deed?
                      We’re old, so true, but are we only clever.

A stupid man once thought he’d turn that wise
to see through mysteries before demise.

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About the Structure of this Sonnet

Sonnets are little artifacts of the language, which have our brains and heart come together and chat for a nice while, hopefully to reach thought provoking and inspiring conclusions. Be Petrarchan, Shakespearean, or any of its variations, sonnets are pieces of melodious reflection that hopefully will arise more reflection.

Shakespeare by John Taylor (c. 1610) - Image in the Public Domain (Wikimedia Commons)

The one above is a Shakespearean sonnet, also known as English or Elizabethan sonnet. We can tell by its name that The Bard made them popular during the Renaissance (XVI century) in Britain. Shakespeare was against the rigidness of the original form (the Italian) and experimented with structures he preferred to the classical ones, perhaps not knowing that his sonnets were about to become the classical ones future generations would study in their literature courses or read for pleasure, or try composing.

A Shakespearean sonnet has fourteen lines, the same as other sonnet forms, but its rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. As we can see, it is three quatrains and a final couplet. Every line is composed in iambic pentameter: five iambs (five metrical feet or couples of syllables sounding taTA).

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A Personal Note

I thought about the "spheres" in van Gogh's Starry Night and how he reproduced the exact position of each one as he worked on his painting. I thought that every man gazes at the stars and wonders and pantomimes through science and arts, and what seems to be a display of knowledge might be just the announcement of their many doubts. This is the initial thought which made me write this brief piece.