Sonnets and Bonnets

When ‘Sonnets and Bonnets’ was chosen as this month’s theme, the first one I could think of was the sonnet that seems to say it all about the guiding thread in Pride and Prejudice:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

(Wm. Shakespeare – Sonnet 116)

We saw it featured in the adaptation of another Austen novel, the 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility:

I just watched this clip again, and it still gave me goosebumps, even if I don’t have much patience for Marianne and her crush on Willoughby. But if we forget about Marianne Dashwood and imagine those lines voice-overed in Mr Darcy’s rich timbre while he is staring into the fire late at night or rambling through his grounds at dawn, sometime between the Hunsford proposal and the Pemberley chance meeting, I think we’re talking goosebumps galore!

There must be lots of other poems in which we could find at least a little something that applies to Elizabeth and Mr Darcy’s love story.

How about these lines?

“True love… is not fantasy’s hot fire,

Whose wishes, soon as granted, fly;

It liveth not in fierce desire,

With dead desire it doth not die;

It is the secret sympathy,

The silver link, the silken tie,

Which heart to heart, and mind to mind,

In body and in soul can bind.”

(Sir Walter Scott, ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’)

Seeing as Mr Darcy fell in lust with Elizabeth before he found his soulmate in her and fell in love, I think that voice-over #2 would be just as swoon-worthy. (Who am I kidding? I could listen to them reading the phonebook and still get goosebumps  😀 ).

Back to Shakespeare’s sonnets, a few weeks ago I was looking for an opening quote for my WIP, and I think I found it:

O! learn to read what silent love hath writ:

To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.

(Wm. Shakespeare – Sonnet 23)

I think that’s why the monster WIP grew and grew: learning to hear with eyes is a tricky business.  I’m hoping it will be published sometime this summer, but I dread the edits and especially the trimming-down. After months & months of adding scenes in, it’s a shock to my system to mercilessly cut some out. Still, it has to be done, or the beast is going to look like this:

Soooo, I’ll gird my loins and start cut-cut-cutting…  😉

Take care, have a lovely day and thanks for stopping by to daydream of Mr Darcy for a little while!