In the Library
The Sonnets
William Shakespeare, 1609
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 1.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 154
- Length
- Length 18k words
£1.99
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Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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Holy Sonnets
John Donne
Donne's Holy Sonnets do the same thing with the fourteen-line form, but turn its arguments on God instead of a mistress or a beautiful young man.
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning does the same thing two centuries later, using the sonnet's tight discipline to count out a real courtship instead of an unsolved Renaissance one.
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The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch
Petrarch
Petrarch's songs for Laura are where the sonnet sequence began, the idealised beloved Shakespeare spent his own sequence mocking and outgrowing.
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About the book
A young man is urged to marry and breed before time's scythe takes his beauty, and the speaker measures his own infatuation against the rigour of fourteen lines. William Shakespeare's 154 sonnets reached print in 1609 under Thomas Thorpe, who fronted the volume with a dedication to a Mr. W. H. that scholars have argued over for four centuries. The Fair Youth, the Dark Lady, the rival poet move through the sequence like figures in a chamber drama. Three quatrains and a closing couplet: the English sonnet is refined here past Sidney and Spenser into the form every later sonneteer would inherit. Summer's lease, marriage of true minds, eyes nothing like the sun: the lines have outlived the men who provoked them.