Bees have fascinated poets from Vergil onwards, and Shakespeare’s lines in ‘King Henry the Fifth’ come to mind. The Archbishop of Canterbury illustrates the principle of the division of labour from a hive, incidentally mistaking the queen-bee for a king: For so work the honey-bees, Creatures that by a rule in nature teach The act […]
Shakespeare
October 7 William Shakespeare
An earlier sonnet expressing a very different emotional sympathy with the season is one of Shakespeare’s Sonnets upon the Autumn of love: That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet […]
October 2 William Shakespeare
Drinking songs celebrating conviviality perhaps seldom achieve poetic distinction, but Shakespeare’s from “Antony and Cleopatra” is surely an exception: Come, thou monarch of the vine, Plumpy Bacchus, with pink eyne! In thy fats our cares be drowned, With thy grapes our hairs be crowned: Cup us, till the world go round, Cup us, till the […]
January 1 William Shakespeare
POETRY MONTHLY : The following twelve sections introduce a range of poetry old and new, answering to the seasonal qualities of each of the twelve months, with brief explanatory links and comments. POETRY MONTHLY – JANUARY Poetry: for our purpose let us define it simply as “the expression of feeling in musical language” and listen […]