Mike Keith

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Original text in yellow, anagram in pink.

Shakespeare's 115th sonnet, a sonnet which contains a hidden message that is revealed when the poem is formatted with the appropriate font and character spacing. In the spirit of this, the anagram also contains a similarly-placed message.

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An anagram of Shakespeare's 66th sonnet, inspired by observing two special features of the original sonnet and trying to reflect those same features in the anagram.

The two properties are:
(1) Sonnet #66 has the smallest percentage of heterogram words (words with no repeated letters) of any Shakespeare sonnet: only 69% of its words are heterograms.
(2) A very good approximation to the number pi is cleverly encoded in the sonnet. To see this, note the position of the only two "pi" bigrams in the sonnet, indicated in bold face in the text below. Now imagine replacing each of the two "pi's" with the single Greek letter pi, represented here by #. Write the whole sonnet as a single string of letters, like so:
Tiredwithallthese......unhap#ly......bylim#ng........lovealone
The total number of letters up to first # is 113; up to the second # there are 242. (242+113)/113 ~= 3.14159, the number pi accurate to six digits.

The anagram echoes these two properties in the following ways:
(1) Instead of a small number of heterograms, every word in the anagram is a heterogram.
(2) The anagram encodes a different well-known mathematical constant. This number (hinted at by the two appearances of "gold" in the text) is the golden ratio, usually denoted by the Greek letter "phi". There are two "phi" trigrams in the anagram (in bold): if they are replaced with the single Greek letter as before then we find that they are at positions 144 and 233, and (233+144)/233 ~= 1.61803, the golden ratio accurate to six digits.

Tired with all these for restful death I cry,
As to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill.
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that to die, I leave my love alone.

Bored with my lot, for terminus I sigh,
As to depict a blue-flocked crimson sea,
And prickly timber-land in late July,
And men of palsy breathing sparingly,
And love eluding whole my philter's plea,
And golden daylight pointedly curtailed,
And hated edicts slighted furtively,
And clouding phials of gold-tinged dye inhaled,
And moral virtue wasted privately,
And righteous altruism lost to hate,
And tired lies of certain noted men,
And strong but silent hearts combined with fate.
Bored with my lot, from life I would depart
And gravely purge the cloister in my heart.

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Updated: May 10, 2016

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