Shakespeare's Sonnets

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Shakespeare's 154 sonnets are a collection of 14-line poems written in the 1590s–early 1600s, published in 1609. The first 126 are addressed to a young man (the "Fair Youth") - an unnamed figure of beauty and privilege - and cycle through a fairly obsessive set of concerns: time destroying beauty, the speaker's own aging and inadequacy, jealousy, flattery, and occasional resentment. The next 28 (127–154) involve the "Dark Lady," a woman the speaker is sexually infatuated with and openly ambivalent about - he frequently admits she isn't conventionally beautiful, that he knows the relationship is bad for him, and that he can't stop anyway. A third figure, the "Rival Poet," shows up midway through the Fair Youth sequence as a source of professional insecurity. The emotional range is genuinely wide - genuine tenderness, self-loathing, bitterness, erotic longing, philosophical resignation - but a lot of them are also working through the same anxiety (beauty fades, art preserves, I love you, you ignore me) with different wordplay each time. The language is dense and the meter is strict, which means individual lines can be stunning while the overall argument of a given sonnet takes some effort to unpack. A handful - 18 ("Shall I compare thee"), 29 ("When in disgrace"), 116 ("Let me not to the marriage"), 130 ("My mistress' eyes") - are genuinely great poems by any standard. The rest vary considerably, and reading all 154 straight through is an acquired taste.