The Sonnet Lover Read Online Free PDF Page A

to me.
    Five years ago a student like Robin with his passionate love of Shakespeare and Renaissance poetry might have chosen to go on to graduate study in English or comparative literature—or maybe an MFA program in playwriting. But instead the new film program has propelled Robin into a filmmaking career that I can’t help but fear—remembering how ragged and tense he looked in class today—is too much for a boy of his age. Perhaps it is even the kind of intense pressure that might compel a boy like Robin to embellish his film with someone else’s words.
    As the first film begins, another thought makes me queasy. What if this is what Robin wanted to talk to me about earlier today? Maybe he’d wanted to confess that he’d “borrowed” part of the script to his film and that was why he was worried about how people were going to react to it. He’d asked me to come to his rescue. But what on earth could I do for him? And what would Mark think if I came to Robin’s defense?
    I try to concentrate on watching the films, willing my heart to beat slower, willing the voices in my head to quiet. I let the montages of disconnected (at least they seem disconnected to me) images and loud music roll over me until I feel a little numb. I can barely feel my heart beating at all. But then the second-to-last entry is filmed with a hand-held camera that’s so shaky, I begin to feel nauseous. I close my eyes until I can tell by the applause that it’s time for Robin’s film. When I open them, my heart begins to race again.
    It’s as if I’ve been transported to the garden at La Civetta at the height of summer. The scene is so lush, so green, that when I breathe in I’m surprised the air doesn’t smell of lemons. The avenue the camera moves down is lined with lemon trees, each one in its own huge terracotta pot. A slim girl steps out from behind one of the pots and, as the camera hovers just over her right shoulder, she opens an old leather-bound book and turns past its marbled endpapers to a page marked with a yellow ribbon. As she begins walking down the avenue of lemon trees, her head bowed to the book as though she were reading, we hear a voice reciting Shakespeare’s sonnet 18.
     
Shall I compare thee to a summer day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
     
    The camera hovers over the girl’s shoulder, so close that strands of her golden hair stray across the lens, but the angle allows us only to glimpse her profile. The breeze that blows her hair also stirs the climbing rose vines that cling to the arbor arching over the avenue. The camera follows a trail of loose petals as they float down to the tiled walk and drift beside the girl’s feet.
     
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
     
    The girl stops and shades her eyes against the sun for the next line:
     
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
     
    And then a shadow moves across her face while the narrator reads:
     
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
     
    The choreography of poem and image would be hokey if the girl weren’t so mysteriously beautiful and the voice so strangely sad. It’s Robin’s voice, I realize as the girl pauses at the end of the lemon avenue to look out at a view of the Tuscan countryside and the orange-tiled roofs of Florence in the distance.
     
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
     
    It’s the same poem we read in class today, but while most of my students could barely be bothered to listen to it, this audience seems to be held in thrall as the girl turns from the sunlit lemon avenue to a shady path between clipped yew hedges.
     
Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;
     
    At the end of the yew walk is a marble tomb, surmounted by a statue of a reclining woman, her