Robert Peake

That is the comment someone left on one of my posts about Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29. Their IP address came from Panama. Based on the email address (amigas por siempre), the commenter is likely young and female - probably a student.

You see, posts I made about Shakespeare or Wallace Stevens are placing high in Google searches. And these days, a remarkable number of students use Google as a means to gather materials for English essays. In fact, a lot of them simply plagiarize what they find. Cut. Paste. Grade.

Read the poem

What is so great about this poem is that it makes excellent use of the momentum of the English sonnet form, culminating in a beautiful pair of lines that simultaneously do and do not make sense: