(Sipping Sonnets: Snack-sized Retellings)

Most people experience the dip. The time in life when lady luck isn’t smiling upon you. When the day bring gloom, dusk stings, and the night portends doom. You find no favors among those you thought friends. Loved ones are few and far
between. You feel a gaze of disdain. In this suffering, this rot – you are alone. A leper has it better. Your cries and screams sink into a bottomless pit. No one to hear you curse your fate.

Despair and envy, your only companions. If only you could steal a soul happier, an ounce more hopeful, than your rusted heart – you would rip it
right out of the next person. If only you could have this one’s beautiful features or that one’s friends; this one’s talent and that one’s skill. With what
you have, the scraps of nature’s offerings, you are contented least.

Yet, in these thoughts – wily and vile – perchance you think of her. That beauteous daughter of the Sun. She whose misty scent mocks the priciest
perfumes of Arabia. And then, just the thought of her river eyes and silken hair, you levitate out of your misery. You break free from the dungeon of
despair. You rise like the lark at sight of day. The heavens descend on mortal soil to hear you sing. Her sweet love brings such wealth, that you rebel
at mere thought of having your fate and fortune replaced with a king’s.

Sonnet 29 by William Shakespeare

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings