Long before the complexities of first love had graced my teenage years, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, “Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s day?”, entered my world during sophomore English class. It wasn’t the romantic undertones that initially captivated me, nor the vivid imagery, though undeniably beautiful. Instead, it was the poem’s bold declaration of immortality within its concluding lines that truly resonated. No specific person occupied my thoughts as I read; it was the sheer audacity of the poem’s claim.
Even as a young student, I grasped the timeless nature of art, its capacity to transcend generations and achieve a form of eternity through connection with readers. But this particular sonnet went further. It asserted immortality not just for the art itself, but explicitly for its subject. This claim wasn’t whispered to a distant audience; it was proclaimed directly to the subject of the poem:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Here, the subject, whether woman or man, elegantly portrayed through metaphor, is immortalized. This act of memorialization, of enshrining in verse, bestows an undeniable value and worth. For someone like myself, a queer, Mexican immigrant navigating the socio-political landscape of Reagan’s America, this concept was transformative. My lived experiences felt largely absent from mainstream culture – unrepresented in media, unacknowledged in religious institutions, and often unseen in the classroom. When glimpses did surface, such as fleeting media portrayals of gay men, they were often overshadowed by the looming shadow of a terrifying health crisis. This invisibility, this life lived on the periphery, eroded my sense of self-worth.
Yet, within this poem’s lines, a spark ignited. A shift occurred. A beginning took root. The final couplet, both melancholic in its acknowledgment of mortality and triumphant in its defiance, offered a powerful message. Language, I realized, possessed the power to bestow worth, to illuminate beauty even in the seemingly unseen.
In the years that followed, many more beginnings would unfold, a cascade of first experiences that eventually coalesced, driving me to write my own poetry. These poems were intensely personal at their inception, born from a need to give voice to what had been neglected, abandoned, forgotten, or never recognized at all. My impetus to write stems from a desire to transmute pain and ugliness into beauty through language, to reveal the universal truths residing within the deeply personal. This, I discovered, is the glorious alchemy of poetry.
