When Literature and Rock Collide

On my way home today, "She's So Cold" from the Rolling Stones was blasting and I was singing along when it hit me.  The lyrics of that song are just a reworking of Spenser's sonnet "My Love Is Like to Ice." I teach it every year to two different courses, so it is kicking around in the back of my mind fairly handy.  Here's the Spenserian sonnet:


My Love Is Like To Ice

My love is like to ice, and I to fire:
How comes it then that this her cold so great
Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,
But harder grows the more I her entreat?
Or how comes it that my exceeding heat
Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,
But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
And feel my flames augmented manifold?
What more miraculous thing may be told,
That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,
And ice, which is congeal's with senseless cold,
Should kindle fire by wonderful device?
Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
That it can alter all the course of kind.

Here's the Rolling Stones:

You judge for yourself.  Maybe it's just a case of that old adage that there's just nothing new under the sun, but this juxtaposition of things made me really, really happy as I sailed down the highway.  Think I'll use this next year when it comes time to teach this again.