Poetry

Traditional reading practices assume literary texts to be ‘perfectly’ complete and unified; however, this negates the notion that a text's sense of completeness is produced by the reading, not the text.

      Discuss with statement with reference to the poems you have studied and the different ways in which they can be read.

|SONNET 18                                                                                                       |
|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 his gold complexion dimm'd;                                                                       |
|And every fair from fair sometime declines,                                                                     |
|By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;                                                               |
|But thy eternal summer shall not fade                                                                           |
|Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;                                                                   |
|Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,                                                               |
|When in eternal lines to time thou growest:                                                                     |
|So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,                                                                     |
|So long lives this and this gives life to thee....