Shakespeare's SonnetsWilliam Shakespeare
About Shakespeare's Sonnets
Shakespeare's were published in 1609, a sequence of 154 poems in the English form of three quatrains and a closing couplet. Composition belongs mainly to the 1590s. The first 126 address a fair young man; sonnets 127–152 turn to a dark lady; the last two play on the myth of Cupid.
The sequence is an argument about love, time, beauty, and verse. The early poems urge the young man to marry and breed, so that beauty will not die with him. Later poems claim that the poet's lines will outlast marble and monuments. Jealousy, absence, rival poets, and self-reproach cut across the praise. With the dark lady the tone hardens: desire and disgust share the same poems.
The give the tradition its densest English meditation on love, memory, and the power of art to resist time. They do not tell a clean story. They stage the mind that cannot settle what it loves or why the loving costs what it costs.