OK, this is a new one…I’m clearing the spam out of my inbox, and come upon the following, addressed to me by Allied Promotions LLC:
“Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,’
But as the riper should by time decease,
Die single and thine image dies with thee.
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface,
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
If thou couldst answer 'This fair child of mine
Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.
Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
Now is the time that face should form another;
But when from highmost pitch, with weary car,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Will play the tyrants to the very same
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Ten times thy self were happier than thou art”
…preceded by some HTML crap about how to get the cheapest mortgage. It sounds familiar, so I Google it. I haven’t gone through it line by line, but it appears to be fragments of various Shakespeare sonnets.
Honestly, I don’t know whether to be glad that someone managed to slip some Shakespeare into my day, no matter how base the motive (evading spam detectors, I would guess), or annoyed that someone would pervert someone else’s literary work in this way.