Shakespeare's Sonnets

About the book

Shakespeare's sonnets return to beauty, attachment, jealousy, absence, ageing, and the possibility that verse might preserve what life cannot hold still. Their speakers do not offer a settled philosophy of love. Instead, each poem develops a pressure of thought, often revising an opening claim as its images and comparisons unfold. The repeated form makes changes of tone especially audible, from confident praise to suspicion, self-reproach, pleading, and defiance. Readers can approach the poems individually or follow the shifting relationships suggested across the sequence without assuming they provide a straightforward personal diary. Much of their force lies in the movement between an intimate address and larger claims about time. A final turn can sharpen, unsettle, or expose the limits of everything that precedes it.

• Love and jealousy
• Time and mortality
• Poetry and memory

Why read it

For the intensity with which a brief, repeated form accommodates changing emotions and intricate turns of thought.

Poetry sequence · English text