Sonnet for the Shrews
Come, mistress, stay – no patriarch am I !
No zealous male, yet you rebuke me so;
I never wish to dim your spark of eye,
For not all men are as Petruchio.
I plead, do not agglomerate my sex,
And score the mixture only by its worst –
When many brothers scant deserve this hex
Of deeming women-passionate as curst.
If chauvinistic authors grumble loud
And laud a brute as model for our kind,
Then know of we who wish you still unbowed
And retch at thoughts of ‘taming’ such a mind.
Far better shrews, for shrewdness thence hath sprung
In women sharp of wit and swift of tongue.
Rhyming Couplets 