Friday, February 14, 2014

Sonnet 118, by NY Shakespeare Exchange


Like as, to make our appetites more keen,
With eager compounds we our palate urge;
As, to prevent our maladies unseen,
We sicken to shun sickness when we purge;
Even so, being full of your ne'er-cloying sweetness,
To bitter sauces did I frame my feeding;
And, sick of welfare, found a kind of meetness
To be diseased, ere that there was true needing.
Thus policy in love, to anticipate
The ills that were not, grew to faults assured,
And brought to medicine a healthful state
Which, rank of goodness, would by ill be cured;
     But thence I learn and find the lesson true,
     Drugs poison him that so fell sick of you.
Sonnet 118, from The Sonnet Project, by the New York Shakespeare Exchange.

Wow, this piece by the Shakespeare Exchange makes me think of the film `Twelve, young men and women from wealthy families, wavering between boredom and ecstasy and in the end sidling tragically into violence and death.  They do so, because of some unrequited love.  That falling sick of you isn't the way that we Americans in modern may interpret it (i.e., as sick and tired of you).  Rather it is falling sick literally, then dying, because of some dsyfunctional, obsessive, and ultimately unrequited longing.

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