We don’t know that you were born on April 23, 1564, just that you were baptized a few days later. And there’s no evidence that you ever spelled your name “Shakespeare” when you signed it. But never mind. You gave us lines like these:
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
[In keeping with tradition…]
Happy 16th birthday, Swab! To honor
this august event, the traditional
verse, updated for the passage of years:
Alerted by the sharp repeated cry
I found him in a compost heap, a puff
of white, all voice and fur, abandoned there.
The mother cat could not be coaxed to take
him back. It fell to me to bottle feed
the ravenous, demanding wisp dubbed Swab,
by careful computation born the same
(and equally uncertain) day we note
by custom as the birthday of the Bard,
four hundred thirty-three the years between.
Now sixteen years, the former kitten yawns
and celebrates by sleeping in the sun.
That looks like my cat. (: