Long ago, during my high school years, the concept of “first love” was still foreign to me. So, when I first encountered Shakespeare’s sonnet, Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?, it wasn’t the romantic undertones that captivated my attention. No particular person, boy or girl, came to mind as I read it in class. While the imagery was undoubtedly beautiful, it was the poem’s bold declaration of immortality in its concluding lines that truly resonated with me.
Even as a young student, I grasped the idea that art, particularly literature, could transcend time. It could achieve a form of eternity, enduring as long as it found a connection with readers across generations. However, this poem unveiled a more profound notion: literature explicitly claiming immortality not only for itself but also for its subject. And this claim wasn’t just directed at the reader; it was addressed to the subject of the poem itself:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
The subject, whether woman or man, rendered with such elegance through metaphor and simile, is immortalized here. Through the poem, they are imbued with value and worth. I was utterly mesmerized. My own experiences as someone from a marginalized background – impoverished, queer, a Mexican immigrant growing up in Reagan’s America – were largely absent or misrepresented in mainstream culture. When aspects were acknowledged, like fleeting media portrayals of gay men, it was often overshadowed by the looming threat and devastation of a new epidemic. This reality created significant challenges – a life lived on the fringes, often unseen – that eroded my sense of self-worth.
But within this sonnet, a spark ignited, a turning point, a genesis. The final couplet, both melancholic and celebratory, acknowledging mortality yet defying it, resonated deeply. Here was language that could bestow worth upon an individual, rendering them beautiful in the process.
The years that followed would bring many more beginnings, many more first experiences, that eventually coalesced and spurred me to write my own poems—poems that were intensely personal, especially at first. My motivations for writing are multifaceted, but the initial impetus was to give voice to what had been overlooked, neglected, forgotten, or never acknowledged at all. I write because through the power of language, I strive to transmute pain and ugliness into beauty, recognizing the universal always lies just beyond the specific, separated only by a few carefully placed line breaks. What a truly glorious alchemy.
