When I originally set up this blog, it was going to be a style blog (hence the whimsical title). Then, when my novel was published, it was going to be a repository for writerly wisdom on its themes. Now that almost a year has elapsed since I posted anything, I feel the time has come to go for broke and shovel in whatever comes to mind. And today, what comes to mind is my response to someone’s challenge to rewrite “Changes” as a Shakespearean sonnet, iambic pentameter and all.
What inspired such an exercise? Someone on Facebook, no less, who shared a version of Glora Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” as a Shakespearean sonnet (credit where it’s due: http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2016/02/11/gloria-gaynors-will-survive-shakespearean-sonnet/). I mused that I would love to carry on this tradition, and someone nominated a song. This song:
CHANGES
Of that for which I waited I knew naught
And wild didst run my time, on streets that led
My feet but to impasses when I thought
A glimpse of honey’d triumph was ahead.
So turned I to the glass to seek within
How other eyes this charlatan might view
And yet its silver’d pond cannot begin
To snare the swift illusions I accrue.
Let change and change again endow its spell
As I affront my own uncanny ways
Let change another guise in me compel
I shun the sun of opulence and praise.
Though time this man may alter with its whip
To fathom time is yet beyond his grip.
***
Iambic pentameter I can do. My ability to mimic Shakespearean grammar and vocabulary is shakier, as I’ve barely laid eyes on the stuff since I left school, but hey, I have the Bard’s complete works at my disposal, and I can revise. For the moment, I feel it’s accomplishment enough to have actually posted something.
Realistically, it probably doesn’t matter what or whether I post here, of course. I’m well aware that Peak Blog has long since come and gone, and Peak Facebook followed not long afterward. All the same, while I’m in the mood, I may do the same to a few more classic songs, because we definitely haven’t yet reached Peak Sonnet…