Sonnet #30"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste; Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, And weep afresh love's long-since-cancelled woe, And moan th' expense of many a vanished sight; Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan, Which I new pay as if not paid before.  But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restored and sorrows end"

While listening to Public Radio International (PRI) the other day I was reminded of my time with the Seattle Young Shakespeare Workshop.  The program was on the use of words and the ability of the few rare and gifted persons like William Shakespeare to craft them in ways that can make the simplest word seem eloquent and which force you to think about every word for fear that you might miss the meaning of the whole. The program quoted one line from Sonnet 129  (a sonnet that was actually assigned to me to perform as a soliloquy) "had, having and in a quest to have extreme," and it was like that one line triggered something in my mind and I found myself reciting the rest of that sonnet that I had not read or thought of in ten years.  "I summon(ed) up remembrances of things past."  There was a point in my life when I had a Shakespeare quote for nearly every situation.  The sonnets offered the romance of lines like, "shall I compare thee to a summers day, thou art more lov'ly and more temperate" (#18), or the ability of love to see past all things and perhaps in truth see more clearly, "I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground: And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare" (130)

When I feel blocked as a writer I still find inspiration in those lines of iambic pentameter floating through my head, but more than that they remind me of the ability of every word to do so much and the opportunities for inspiration that exist in every moment.