Shakespeare mocked

I wish I had recorded my son's comments on Shakespeare's sonnets: "abab cdcd efef gg." He was referring to the rhyme scheme: Four stanzas of three quatrains and a final couplet set in the iambic pentameter. "The sonnets don't even have titles," he said, "just numbers."

He was making short work not just of the sonnets but of English poetry in general, possibly to annoy his mother, who was chatting online with us.

She teaches English at a college in Calcutta (Kolkata), and he is taking an English course because he has to at his liberal arts college in America. He is doing a double major in science, but on top of that he must take other courses too. He himself chose English. In fact, he writes quite well.

He has been doing scansion. That's something she loves. So she offered to give him a few tips online, but he was having none of it. "Our teacher has told us that 80 per cent of the time, English verses are iambic,'' he said. And he was counting on that to see him through. That's what he claimed. Actually, I have seen a paper he wrote on Tolkien, and I was so impressed. Whether he does it on his own, or whether his teachers make him do it, he has been doing serious work -- and not just on his favourite science subjects but for other courses too.

And he has become so independent. He didn't want his mother to help him even with his English. He had to read Oscar Wilde, he said. My wife immediately went gaga about Wilde's wit and humour. But he cut her short. "Where's the wit and humour in The Picture of Dorian Gray?" he asked. That was the first time we heard he had read Dorian Gray. They had to do it in class, he said. And we didn't know it until last night.