Rob Watson

Robert N. Watson is Distinguished Professor of English. He received his degrees from Yale and Stanford, and was a professor at Harvard before moving to UCLA, where he has served as Chair of the Faculty of Letters and Science, Vice-Provost for Educational Innovation, and Neikirk Chair for Innovative Undergraduate Education. He has won UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award and the Gold Shield Faculty Prize. He has published multiple prize-winning scholarly books, editions, and articles, on Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, and environmentalism, and his poetry has appeared in The New Yorker and dozens of other literary journals. He has been awarded Guggenheim, NEH, and ACLS fellowships, spent a year as a Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and this fall was the Fowler Hamilton Fellow at Christ Church College, Oxford.

Commentaries, Sonnet 29

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,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self 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 remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

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