Sonnet Lover

Chapter One The most thankless job on the planet may well be teaching Renaissance love poetry to a group of hormone-dazed adolescents on a beautiful spring day. I had saved up against just such a day, through the deep snows of February, the sleets of March, and April's endless deluge, one of the most popular and accessible of Shakespeare's sonnets, but I might as well have been reciting the Dow Jones Industrial Average for all the impact the Bard's words were having on the class. Even Robin Weiss, my best student, was more interested in the sunbathers and Frisbee players cavorting five stories below us in Washington Square Park than in answering my last question. "I'm sorry," he says, his eyes still on the sun-splashed scene outside the window. "Could you repeat the question?" "I asked what you thought of Shakespeare's promise to his beloved to immortalize him through art." "Hmph." Robin begins by ejecting a disdainful breath of air. "I think of it the way I think of most lovers' promises, that he 'speaks an infinite deal of nothing.' " A chorus of sighs from the girls in the back row greets Robin's pronouncement. Had they all had their hearts broken recently? I wonder. Perhaps by Robin himself? Weren't they a little young to be giving up on love? But then I remember that this is exactly the age that feels love's disappointment the most keenly, the age when one might forswear love, never guessing there might come a day when one is forsworn by love. "So you don't think that art provides immortality?" I ask, unwilling to let Robin hide behind the world-weary pose he's worn, along with a vintage Versace tweed jacket lined in yellow silk, since returning from the fall semester in Florence. I still remembered the fervor he'd had in Freshman Comp. He was going to be a playwright because, he said, to have your words spoken on the stage after your death meant you'd never truly be dead. I knew he'd switched his ambition to filmmaker since then and had spent his time in Italy making a film that the whole campus was talking about. In fact, tonight it was to be shown at the Hudson College Invitational Film Show, where it was expected to win first prize. Was Robin already jaded by success? Turning from the sun toward me, though, his face looks not so much jaded as bruised. His pale blue eyes are dilated and bloodshot, his full lips are chapped and swollen, and his delicate skin is chafed and raw. His sandy brown hair looks as wild as the signature Medusa heads on the buttons of his jacket. I'm used to my students looking haggard around finals time, but Robin looks as if he'd spent the last week weeping. I would happily let him off the hookespecially since I can tell by the shuffling of books and shouldering of backpacks and by my watch, which lies on the desk in front of me, that the class's hour is drawing to an endbut Robin chooses to answer my question with a question. Or rather, two questions. "If you lost someone you loved, would reading something about himor by himlessen the loss one iota? Wouldn't you trade all the poems and all the plays in all the world for just five minutes with him again?" "Well," I begin, intending to deal with Robin's questions as I usually deal with difficultor in this case, unanswerablequestions in class: by turning it back to the student. Maybe even assigning it as an essay topic. But Robin is looking at me as though he really expects an answer. As if he'd been offered this Faustian bargain last night at theGoodman, Carol is the author of 'Sonnet Lover ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780345479570 and ISBN 0345479572.