"Death to me subscribes"

Thanks to my favorite twitter bot Willy Shakes, I discovered this Shakespeare sonnet, which I don't even remember having read before (though I must have) but now like very much indeed:

CVII.

 Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time,
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes:
   And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
   When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.

The last line is uncharacteristically good for a Shakespeare sonnet. I like the messing around with choriambs in the first two lines -- a stretch to call it a conscious rhythmical echo of "Exegi monumentum aere perennius," which the sonnet generally evokes, but it's very effective on its own terms. The second quatrain definitely refers -- to my mind -- to James I's peace with Spain ca. 1604, but there's some controversy about when exactly the poem was written. NB there is a very closely parallel passage by Drayton, who is more explicit about the events (Idea, LI):

Lastly mine eyes amazedly have seen
Essex's great fall, Tyrone his peace to gain;
The quiet end of that long-living Queen;
This King's fair entrance; and our peace with Spain,
We and the Dutch at length ourselves to sever.

"Mad in pustule and in postgraduate so"

Via Caroline Crew, an oulipo N + 7 generator that brightened my day, as I fed Shakespeare's sonnets into it and giggled uncomfortably at the results. [Edit. Obligatory Wikipedia link.] A great deal of this kind of thing:

The seal, all waterproof, yet receives raisin still,
And in abundance addeth to his storm; [Sonnet 135]

The seagull, all watermark, yet receives rainstorm still,

The seahorse, all watermelon, yet receives raise still,

But perhaps the best results were obtained with the first sonnet I tried, "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame." Here is a complete version:

N+10

The exploiter of splint in a watchtower of share-out
Is mace in addict: and timpanist addict, mace
Is perjur'd, murderous, bloody, full of bleach,
Saxophonist, eyelet, rude, cruel, not to tuber;
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight;
Past rebuke hunted; and no sooner had,
Past rebuke hated, as a sweater'd ballad,
On pusher laid to make the tambourine mad:
Mad in pussyfoot and in posterior so;
Had, having, and in quiet to have, eyelet;
A bliss in prophet,— and prov'd, a very wonderland;
Before, a juggler propos'd; behind a drift.
All this the wrapper well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heifer that leads mandrills to this hemisphere.

(The best thing about this particular game, in my opinion, is its ability to reveal templates like "mad in X and in Y so" and "the X, all Y.")

The opening of Prufrock also comes out quite well:

The muttering revamps
Of restless nightingales in one-nightingale checkpoint hours
And sawdust restrictions with pacifier-sherries:
Stretchers that follow like a tedious armadillo
Of insidious interchange
To lead you to an overwhelming quickie . . .
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our vivisectionist.

Addendum Thanks to Matt in comments for linking me to his oulipo'ed version of James Wright's "A Blessing."

They bowl shyly as wet swastikas. They lumberjack each other.
There is no lotion like theirs.

"Croupon, catastrophe, stern-works, toby, truck-end"

David Crystal considers whether it is anachronistic to see a pun on Bottom in Midsummer Night's Dream -- the answer (to my mind, a little surprisingly) is that it is. Crystal lists the attested synonyms for "buttocks" in various historical periods:

1000s: arse
1200s: cule, latter end, fundament, buttock
1300s: tut, tail, toute, nage, tail-end, brawn, bum
1400s: newscher, croupon, rumple, lend, butt, luddock, rearward, croup
1500s: backside, dock, rump, hurdies, bun, sitting-place, prat, nates, crupper, posteriorums,
1600s: cheek, catastrophe, podex, posterior, seat, poop, stern, breek, flitch, bumfiddle, quarter, foundation, toby
1700s: rear, moon, derriere, fud, rass, bottom
1800s: stern-post, hinderland, hinderling, ultimatum, behind, rear end, hinder, botty, stern-works, jacksy,
1900s: sit, truck-end, tochus, BTM, sit-upon, bot, sit-me-down, fanny, beam, ass, can, keister, batty, bim, quoit, rusty-dusty, twat, zatch, booty, bun, tush

 Re "botty" / "batty" see also Geoff Pullum's old post on the term "batty man" and homophobia in the Caribbean. Re "twat" and "fanny" -- I wonder what the criteria are for euphemisms to become ambiguous in this way -- I had honestly never thought of the former as potentially ambiguous, but here is the OED:

1964    M. Kelly March to Gallows xii. 132,   I could tell her what to do with her twat if she's frightened to sit on it.

Claustrophilic keyboards

Blogging's been light, partly because I've been traveling -- I'm in Atlanta now -- but more because the spacebar on my keyboard has turned unresponsive, which makes typing pretty unpleasant. (Keyboard woes are a bit of a leitmotif; some still remember the time, almost a decade ago, that my O key got stuck and I had to invent a fake Scots dialect in which O always had to be ai/ae/a/ui, as appropriate -- except every nu and then I'd break into relentless bouts of O's.) I'm in Atlanta; the adviser's putting me up in his spare bedroom, which is just outside the GA tech campus but quite far from other visible signs of civilization. Back in Urbana Wed.

One can quote without typing so, "topically," here's Chekhov:

Something strange was happening to him. His neck, round which soft, fragrant arms had so lately been clasped, seemed to him to be anointed with oil; on his left cheek near his moustache where the unknown had kissed him there was a faint chilly tingling sensation as from peppermint drops, and the more he rubbed the place the more distinct was the chilly sensation…. He wanted to dance, to talk, to run into the garden, to laugh aloud. He quite forgot that he was round-shouldered and uninteresting, that he had lynx-like whiskers and an “undistinguished appearance.”

And here's Shakespeare (one assumes), from his late play Two Noble Kinsmen (written with John Fletcher):

Hail, sovereign queen of secrets, who hast power
To call the fiercest tyrant from his rage,
And weep unto a girl; that hast the might,
Even with an eye-glance, to choke Mars’s drum
And turn th’ alarm to whispers; that canst make
A cripple flourish with his crutch, and cure him
Before Apollo; that mayst force the king
To be his subject’s vassal, and induce
Stale gravity to dance; the poll’d bachelor,
Whose youth, like wanton boys through bonfires,
Have skipp’d thy flame, at seventy thou canst catch,
And make him, to the scorn of his hoarse throat,
Abuse young lays of love. What godlike power
Hast thou not power upon?
[...]
I knew a man
Of eighty winters—this I told them—who
A lass of fourteen brided. ’twas thy power
To put life into dust: the aged cramp
Had screw’d his square foot round,
The gout had knit his fingers into knots,
Torturing convulsions from his globy eyes
Had almost drawn their spheres, that what was life
In him seem’d torture. This anatomy
Had by his young fair fere a boy, and I
Believ’d it was his, for she swore it was,
And who would not believe her? Brief, I am
To those that prate and have done, no companion;
To those that boast and have not, a defier;
To those that would and cannot, a rejoicer.

"In eerie female reservoirs of bran"

I found out via Elisa Gabbert about the poet K. Silem Mohammad's "Sonnagrams," which are exact anagrams of Shakespeare sonnets; from the author's note, "The title is composed last, using whatever letters are left over once I’ve assembled a working sonnet." Here are some at Boo magazine; here are some more at Wag's Revue; they're all quite remarkable if you like stunt poems, and some of them are great in a surrealistic way even if you don't. Here's one:

My, You Annoy Me, Funny Daddy Roy: Yes, You of Uneasy Eye (Eye of Yore)

Wise fools who rub the curly heads of state,
Sweet monsters who sell honor out for fun:
Now by my learned counsel be set straight,
And board a flying saucer for the sun.

Lifesaver, doughnut, onion ring, or halo;
Lacuna, vacuum, emptiness, or hole—
The UFOs in Limbo hover way low;
In Purgatory, langue’s denied parole.

I know a word the OED omits:
Its syllables are fatal to be heard.
Whoever says it retches, dies, and shits;
I urge you not to utter such a word.

Although you feel the author’s days are through,
The author in the end erases you.

And here's another (which I hesitated about posting because of possible search-engine repercussions):

WWW (I Heil My, My, My Hitler; I Heel My Whiny Cur; I Wrap My Rueful Vulva in My Limp, Unholy Fur)
 
You few non-nude and many naked elk,
Who, in your ludic pastures over yon,
Fear not the mad Behemoth’s flailing whelk
That abrogates our fretful Helicon:

You indolent nude teens who always flee
Redactions of a crude antithesis:
The symmetry of progress yet must be
The progress of a symmetry (like this).

 If ponies value nudity, they do
As Puritans do patriotic rap;
You hear this said, and know it to be true,
As if it were a boner in your lap.

For nudity is only true in porn;
For why was Woodrow Wilson ever born?