Take Your Poet to Work: William Shakespeare

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Take Your Poet to Work Day William ShakespeareIt’s one thing to start every day with a poem. But another altogether to start your day with a poet. One of our favorite days of the year is fast approaching, when we encourage people around the world to take their favorite poet to work for the day.

Take Your Poet to Work Day is coming July 15

To help you play and celebrate with us, we’re releasing poets each week in a compact, convenient format you can tuck in your pocket, tool belt, or lunchbox. We started our celebration two years ago with Sara Teasdale,  Pablo Neruda,  T. S. Eliot,  Rumi,  Edgar Allan Poe,  and the reclusive Emily Dickinson (for folks who work at home). We even released a full collection,  The Haiku Masters: Matsuo Basho, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa. And last year, we added Langston Hughes,  Adrienne Rich,  John Keats,  William Butler Yeats,  Christina Rossetti and the beloved 20th-century American poet, Sylvia Plath.

Because you can never have too many poets in your lunch box (or your desk drawer), we have a new collection of poets to release this year, beginning with the Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare.

Take Your Poet to Work: William Shakespeare

Take Your Poet to Work Day William Shakespeare Printable

Get your own downloadable version of Take Your Poet to Work Day William Shakespeare Printable that you can print, color and cut out for the big day.

 

William Shakespeare, the “Bard of Avon, ” was an English poet and playwright and is generally considered to be the greatest English-language writer. He was born in 1564 in Stratford-Upon-Avon and married Anne Hathaway at the age of 18. He and Anne had three children.

By the late 1500s, Shakespeare was working as an actor and playwright in London, eventually building a theatre (The Globe) on the Thames River with his business partners.

Shakespeare is credited with authoring 38 plays including tragedies Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet as well as comedies A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado About Nothing. He also wrote 154 sonnets (hence the Shakespearean sonnet style) and a pair of of narrative poems. Because little is known of his personal history, and because of his limited academic credentials, speculation has arisen from time to time as to the actual authorship of work credited to him.

William Shakespeare died in 1616, leaving behind a long legacy of poems and plays, many of which have been reimagined in a variety of forms.

Sonnet 130: My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
   As any she belied with false compare.

 

Sonnet 33: Full many a glorious morning have I seen

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all-triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;
The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.
  Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
  Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.

 

Learn more about Take Your Poet to Work Day and our featured poets

Discover more Poets and Poems

Explore more William Shakespeare

Post and illustrations by LW Lindquist.

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Will Willingham
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Will Willingham

Director of Many Things; Senior Editor, Designer and Illustrator at Tweetspeak Poetry
I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel, Adjustments, is available now.
Will Willingham
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Comments

  2. My daughter is going to a Shakespeare festival later this summer with students from school, and then is planning to sign up for a college-level Shakespeare class in spring. She’s excited about it. I tried to make Shakespeare accessible to my kids from early on; at the very least, I wanted the story lines of the plays to feel familiar.

    During the 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 school years, the high school writing class I taught tried composing Shakespearean sonnets. For teens unfamiliar with the sonnet form, I was impressed with the results.

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