Shakespeare’s Sonnets - Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness:
In the ensuing pages, we offer you each and every sonnet abridged into a convenient couplet of iambic tetrameter. We urge you to read the entire book in a single sitting in order to achieve a newfound understanding of the sonnets, which will allow you to stop sending these as a love offering and start sending them as a subtle insult.
Sonnet 18:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Becomes:
Summer’s bad, then dies. You won’t.
(Okay, you will, but poems don’t.)
This premise seemed to be too cute by half,
But I was wrong—it does delight and please.
Myself, I find I need just two more beats,
Or else it’s just too short and just a tease.