Shakespeare’s Sonnets

by Shakespeare

First published 1609

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This sequence of 154 sonnets explores love, beauty, ageing, jealousy, betrayal, poetry and the pressure of time. Many early poems address a young man, first urging him to preserve beauty through descendants and later developing a more complicated language of admiration, dependence and rivalry.

The later sonnets include the figure traditionally called the Dark Lady and place sexual desire beside distrust, self-criticism and moral contradiction. Across the sequence, Shakespeare repeatedly tests whether verse can preserve what time destroys. The poems resist a single continuous narrative, but recurring speakers and relationships create one of the most intensely debated bodies of lyric poetry in English.