Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday,

June 10th, 2004. Today's poem is by contemporary poet R.S. Gwynn, and it's called Shakespearean

Sonnet. I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more time.

This poem has an epigraph which reads,

With a first line taken from the TV listings,

A man is haunted by his father's ghost.

Boy meets girl while feuding families fight. A Scottish king is murdered

by his host. Two couples get lost on a summer night. A hunchback murders all who block his way.

A ruler's rivals plot against his life. A fat man and a prince make rebels pay. A noble moor has doubts about his wife. An English

king decides to conquer France. A duke learns that his best friend is a she. A forest

sets the scene for this romance. An old man and his daughters disagree. A Roman leader makes a big mistake. A sexy queen is

bitten by a snake. There you have it. As soon as you read or hear this poem, you can begin to make sense of the title.

This is a Shakespearean sonnet in more than one sense.

Last week, we spent the entire week looking at and hearing sonnets by Shakespeare.

This is something a little different.

It's written in the form of the English sonnet that came to bear Shakespeare's name.

And it is made up of one-line summaries of 14 of Shakespeare's plays.

This is definitely a playful use of the form and enjoyment of the form.

It might also be, if the epigraph has any truth to it, a form of found poetry.

First, readers of a certain age might not know what a TV listing is.

I am a teacher and I'm constantly surprised when my students remind me that they were born in this millennium and not the last, that they were born after major world events that I sort of take for granted as the common

experience of everybody alive. So it's possible that if younger people are listening you might not know that a TV listing was

...