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 73

That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

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