The Sonnet Lover Read Online Free PDF

face veiled. As Robin reads the concluding couplet of sonnet 18 we see the same lines inscribed in the marble:
     
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
     
    The tomb and the statue are from the late Renaissance, but the lines were added in the early twentieth century by Cyril Graham’s father, Sir Lionel, who was so taken by Shakespeare that he peopled his gardens with statues of Shakespearian characters and adorned every available inch of bare marble with lines from the plays and sonnets. The tomb stands, I remember, just outside the lower entrance to the teatrino, the green theater, so I’m not surprised when we follow the girl into the semicircular grove framed by topiary clipped to look like side wings and footlights. The green stage is peopled by statues modeled after Shakespeare’s leading ladies. The girl strolls by Miranda, Ophelia, and Juliet, and then comes to pause in front of the last statue. This one is of a boy, or rather, I realize, it’s supposed to be Rosalind from As You Like It dressed as a boy. But when the girl leans forward and kisses the statue, it becomes a real boy—one I recognize as Orlando. As she embraces him, I recognize her as well—she’s the girl from the park, Zoe, wearing a blond wig. The embrace is so realistic that I begin to wonder whether this is what all the fuss was about in the park—a teenage love triangle that’s gone sour. Maybe the real theft Orlando was upset about was of this girl—not a piece of writing after all.
    The long embrace is broken by a noise that we don’t hear but sense in the couple’s guilty expressions. While the girl looks behind her, the boy snatches the book from her hand and flees the teatrino, disappearing into the shrubbery. We see the girl’s face for one moment, her features contorted with grief; then she plunges into the hedges to follow him.
    The camera follows the girl crashing through dense woods. The garden has become a wasteland of overgrown thicket and toppled and broken statuary. It takes me a few minutes to recognize—or even notice—the sonnet Robin’s reciting now: number 35, which begins “No more be grieved at that which thou hast done”—Shakespeare’s note of forgiveness for his beloved’s betrayal. The poem’s images of corruption—cankerous roses and mud-stained fountains—are mirrored in the landscape through which the girl wanders. The rose petals that drifted by her feet in the first scene appear again, but now they stain the tiled walk like splotches of dried blood. Her face is scratched by thorny bushes and her clothes are stained with mud by the time she comes out of the wilderness and sees the dark-haired boy sitting on the rim of a ruined fountain with another woman, their heads bent over the Moroccan-bound book, laughing at what’s written there. We can see from Zoe’s ravaged expression that her degradation is complete. When the couple leaves the fountain, they leave behind the book, which Zoe picks up.
    She turns away and begins walking up a wide, bare avenue, which I recognize as the lemon avenue of the first scene—only now the lemon trees are gone and the rose arbor, which had been flowering in the first scene, is bare. In the course of the short film, spring has become fall, afternoon has become evening. We see the sun setting over the Tuscan hills as the girl pauses outside a stucco building, the last light seeping into its rich ochre paint. I recognize the building as the limonaia, the lemon house, where the potted lemon trees are kept in the winter. The girl presses her face against the glass and we can see her breath crystallize on the cold pane. Inside, the lemons glow like jewels against the glossy green leaves. The lemon trees, beyond the glass, are like a mirage of summer, more a memory than something real. The camera stays on her face as we hear the last poem.
    It’s not one I recognize, which is unlikely considering I wrote my