Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, October 13th, 2025.

Today's poem is by William Shakespeare.

It is his sonnet number 94.

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

Sonnet 94

They that have power to hurt and will do none, that do not do the thing they most do show,

who moving others are themselves as stone, unmoved, cold, and to temptation,

slow. They rightly do inherit heaven's graces, and husband nature's riches from expense.

They are the lords and owners of their faces, others but stewards of their excellence.

The summer's flower is to the summer sweet, though to itself it only live and die.

But if that flower with base infection meat, the basest weed outbraves his dignity.

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds.

Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

I don't know that anyone has ever ranked Shakespeare's sonnets in terms of their difficulty to read and comprehend,

but I think this one comes in near the top of the

list. It's a thinky sonnet. It's a little more complicated than the average Shakespearean

sonnet, which is really just something like, you are beautiful and I love you, but your beauty will fade. Good thing, I'm a

brilliant poet who can immortalize your beauty in my verse, which will never die. There's something

else, a little more going on here. It begins almost with this kind of Nietzschean will to power,

this idea that the superior person is the one who has the power to do something and doesn't do it.

This restraint and immovability that encompasses their whole person and persona.

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