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For Which We Toil'd

The explanations of the popular movement that made Shakespeare's "Sonnet XXV" the 32nd Amendment to the Constitution will never, I am convinced, really capture the national mood that made it happen. Moods, plural, one should say, since there were multiple and differing causes.

Differing to the point of contradiction, to be quite honest.

Nor will it be easy to explain why the 29th Sonnet—the one commentators felt sure would be ratified first, of all the Sonnet Amendments—faltered, and fell from favor.

The cynical sneer, and assert that Americans will never give up their yearning to be kings.

That may be. It is clear that metaphor has been a difficult pill for the Federal bench to swallow. One need only review their poorly handled squabbles over which phrase ("Let those who are in favour" or "and all the rest forgot") is the Amendment's enabling clause . . . well, it was perhaps too much to expect judges to cope with Beauty.

Still, on sticky summer evenings in East Tennessee, I find myself hoping that eventually the promise of the 32nd Amendment will be fulfilled.

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Timons Esaias is a satirist, writer and poet living in Pittsburgh. His works, ranging from literary to genre, have been published in twenty-two languages. He has been a finalist for the British Science Fiction Award, and he won both the Winter Anthology Contest and the Asimov's Readers Award. His story "Norbert and the System" has appeared in a textbook, and in college curricula, so yes, he is required reading. He was shortlisted for the 2019 Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Prize. His full-length Louis-Award-winning collection of poetry—Why Elephants No Longer Communicate in Greek—was brought out by Concrete Wolf.

He teaches in Seton Hill University's MFA in Writing Popular Fiction program. People who know him are not surprised to learn that he lived in a museum for eight years.