Category Archives: Sonnets

Sir John Gielgud and Alfred Corn read Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare. Listen!

…If you are ever going to memorize a sonnet of Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 may be the one because it is beautiful to say, easy to understand, and anyone with just a little practice can communicate it. Sonnet 18 is one of the sonnets written to […]

Sonnets 1 through 19 written by William Shakespeare and read by Sir John Gielgud

  Shakespeare’s first nineteen sonnets are addressed to a handsome young man. Procreation is its own kind of heaven, Shakespeare tells him, urging him to breed, not waste his seed, but live on through his offspring. Beginning in sonnet fifteen, there is another kind of  […]

Sonnet 29 by William Shakespeare

… When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself, and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featur’ d like him, […]

Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare

… Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is […]

Sonnet 98 by William Shakespeare

… It’s April. Everything is young and beautiful. But you’re not here. It might as well be winter. You’ve cast your shadow over everything. … From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim, Hath put a […]

Sonnet 60 by William Shakespeare

… Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards do contend. Nativity, once in the main of light, Crawls to maturity, wherewith being […]

Ozymandias

… I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that […]

Bernadette Mayer reads Sonnet written with Philip Good

… Bernadette Mayer reads a sonnet that she wrote with Philip Good. Sonnets published by Tender Buttons Press. .. … … …

Bernadette Mayer reads from the Sonnets: We Eat Out Together

… My heart is a fancy place Where giant reddish-purple cauliflowers & white ones in French & English are outside Waiting to welcome you to a boat Over the low black river for a big dinner There’s a lot of choice among the foods Even […]

Bernadette Mayer reads from the Sonnets: Taking the Humbler Path for Ron Padgett

….. “TAKING THE HUMBLER PATH” ………for Ron Padgett Was excellent advice from Ron In a dream I fell We were walking in the rush hour Got pushed into a snowbank By a man in a Bentley &climbingoveritIfellinlikeGreek&Latin Scared at first I’d lose the bottom But […]

Edwin Denby reads The Climate and People on Sunday

… … THE CLIMATE I myself like the climate of New York I see it in the air up between the street You use a worn-down cafeteria fork But the climate you don’t use stays fresh and neat. Even we people who walk about in […]

Sonnet 8 from A Sonnet Sequence by Edwin Denby

… From 1976 until 1983, Jacob Burckhardt recorded and edited Edwin Denby reading from his Collected Poems. Here is Sonnet 8 from A Sonnet Sequence. 8 Three old sheepherders so filthy in their ways Whores wouldn’t touch them with a ten foot pole Saw once […]