Shakespeare's Sonnets

[Dark Saint Alaick]

Shakespeare's Sonnets



Shakespeare's sonnets are a collection of 154 sonnets, dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality, first published in a 1609 quarto entitled 'SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS' : Never before imprinted. (although sonnets 138 and 144 had previously been published in the 1599 miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim). The quarto ends with 'A Lover's Complaint', a narrative poem of 47 seven-line stanzas written in rhyme royal. The first 17 poems, traditionally called the procreation sonnets, are addressed to a young man urging him to marry and have children in order to immortalize his beauty by passing it to the next generation. Other sonnets express the speaker's love for a young man; brood upon loneliness, death, and the transience of life; seem to criticise the young man for preferring a rival poet; express ambiguous feelings for the speaker's mistress; and pun on the poet's name. The final two sonnets are allegorical treatments of Greek epigrams referring to the 'little love-god' Cupid.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

I.


FROM fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light'st flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, makest waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

II.


When forty winters shall beseige thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter'd weed, of small worth held:
Then being ask'd where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use,
If thou couldst answer 'This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,'
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

III.


Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose unear'd womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime:
So thou through windows of thine age shall see
Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.
But if thou live, remember'd not to be,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

IV.


Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty's legacy?
Nature's bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free.
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thyself alone,
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.
Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tomb'd with thee,
Which, used, lives th' executor to be.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

V.


Those hours, that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which fairly doth excel:
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter and confounds him there;
Sap cheque'd with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness every where:
Then, were not summer's distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was:
But flowers distill'd though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

[rajnish manga]

Originally Posted by Dark Saint Alaick

Shakespeare's Sonnets



Shakespeare's sonnets are a collection of 154 sonnets, dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality, first published in a 1609 quarto entitled 'SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS' : Never before imprinted. (although sonnets 138 and 144 had previously been published in the 1599 miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim). The quarto ends with 'A Lover's Complaint', a narrative poem of 47 seven-line stanzas written in rhyme royal. The first 17 poems, traditionally called the procreation sonnets, are addressed to a young man urging him to marry and have children in order to immortalize his beauty by passing it to the next generation. Other sonnets express the speaker's love for a young man; brood upon loneliness, death, and the transience of life; seem to criticise the young man for preferring a rival poet; express ambiguous feelings for the speaker's mistress; and pun on the poet's name. The final two sonnets are allegorical treatments of Greek epigrams referring to the 'little love-god' Cupid.

Thank you very much, Alaick ji, for providing this great opportunity to go and sift through the entire collection of shakesperean sonnets numbering 154. My personal choice rests on the sonnets with the following first lines:

1. Let me not to the marriage of true minds
2. To me dear friend, you never can be old
3. When in the chronical of wasted time

Recently, I have come to know that all the 154 sonnets of Shakespeare have been converted into synthetic DNA. Can you tell us what does that mean and how a sonnet can be identified by it ?

[Dark Saint Alaick]

It can store the information from a million CDs in a space no bigger than your little finger, and could keep it safe for centuries. Is this some new electronic gadget? Nope. It's DNA. The genetic material has long held all the information needed to make plants and animals, and now some scientists are saying it could help handle the growing storage needs of today's information society. Researchers reported Wednesday that they had stored all 154 Shakespeare sonnets, a photo, a scientific paper, and a 26-second sound clip from Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech. That all fit in a barely visible bit of DNA in a test tube. The process involved converting the ones and zeroes of digital information into the four-letter alphabet of DNA code. That code was used to create strands of synthetic DNA. Then machines 'read' the DNA molecules and recovered the encoded information. That reading process took two weeks, but technological advances are driving that time down, said Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, England. He's an author of a report published online by the journal Nature. DNA could be useful for keeping huge amounts of information that must be kept for a long time but not retrieved very often, the researchers said. Storing the DNA would be relatively simple, they said: Just put it in a cold, dry and dark place and leave it alone.

Ideal for large archives : The technology might work in the near term for large archives that have to be kept safe for centuries, like national historical records or huge library holdings, said study co-author Nick Goldman of the institute. Maybe in a decade it could become feasible for consumers to store information they want to have around in 50 years, like wedding photos or videos for future grandchildren, Goldman said in an email. The researchers said they have no intention of putting storage DNA into a living thing, and that it couldn't accidentally become part of the genetic machinery of a living thing because of its coding scheme. Sriram Kosuri, a Harvard researcher who co-authored a similar report last September, said both papers show advantages of DNA for long-term storage. But because of its technical limitations, "it's not going to replace your hard drive," he said. Kosuri's co-author, Harvard DNA expert George Church, said the technology could let a person store all of Wikipedia on a fingertip, and all the world's information now stored on disk drives could fit in the palm of the hand.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

Some more-

If you've ever thought that there's not enough space to store all your CDs and digital photos then scientists have the answer for you! Researchers at the European Bioinformatics Institute say every film and TV programme ever made will now fit inside a teacup - using new DNA technology. All such data can be transformed into special synthetic material - creating a tiny piece of DNA. To explain more we joined by co-author of the study, Dr Nick Goldman.

Well, just like we’re used to storing information in computer, where inside computer it’s stored as a series of zeros and ones in a binary code, we realize that we can write a computer program that would read zeros and ones in any file on our computer disk drive and convert that into a language which uses just the letters A, C, G and T. And we chose that, because those four letters are what is used to represent the basis of D.N.A. sequences, just like in human genome or any living organism. We’ve also made a code that can create this sequence of A, C, G and T – machines can actually make the physical D.N.A. that corresponds to that code.

What kind of size are we talking about?

It’s incredibly small. In the experiment we did, we stored almost 1 Mbit of files from the hard disc drive of computer. And that came in a test tube half the size of your little finger. And I thought that it was empty, it’s a tiny speck of white dust at the bottom of the test tube.

What could we use this technology for?

The thing that’s really good about DNA is that it lasts very long time in a very stable form and you don’t need to give any special condition to do that. You keep it cool and dry and in the dark – it’ll survive unaltered for tens of thousands of years. So if you’re thinking about a long-term archive of really important information like the Library of Alexandria, which didn’t have a backup, unfortunately, that’s the kind of application where we might be able to put it in D.N.A. and save it for a really long time.

So you’ve already encoded Shakespeare’s sonnets and speech by Martin Luther King. Would I be able to store personal information, like my favorite films or photos in my own D.N.A?

I wouldn’t advise you to put it in your own D.N.A. We’re using synthetic D.N.A. that’s completely different code to that of living organisms. But in our code you could write into synthetic D.N.A. the film or your MP3 collection or anything you want – it would however be very expensive at today’s prices.

And how long will this kind of information last?

It’d last for 10,000, 20,000 or 50,000 years if you keep it safe.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

XI.

As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou growest
In one of thine, from that which thou departest;
And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestowest
Thou mayst call thine when thou from youth convertest.
Herein lives wisdom, beauty and increase:
Without this, folly, age and cold decay:
If all were minded so, the times should cease
And threescore year would make the world away.
Let those whom Nature hath not made for store,
Harsh featureless and rude, barrenly perish:
Look, whom she best endow'd she gave the more;
Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish:
She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby
Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.