Sonnet 17, by NY Shakespeare Exchange

Who will believe my verse in time to come,
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
Though yet heaven knows it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say 'This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne'er touched earthly faces.'
So should my papers, yellowed with their age,
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be termed a poet's rage
And stretched metre of an antique song:
     But were some child of yours alive that time,
     You should live twice, in it, and in my rhyme.

Sonnet 17, from The Sonnet Project, by the New York Shakespeare Exchange.

Carey Van Driest makes this high romance approachable and contemporary.  Her reading, and her looks, are unforced, and it is how, I believe, a modern day audience can best relate to a love poem so skillfully written.  I love, too, the time-lapse cinematography, as if Van Driest, as the voice for this sonnet, were in fact traveling in time.