Plain English. Pure Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is best known for his plays and his sonnets, but he also wrote four longer poems. Two of them, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, were published in 1593 and 1594, while plague kept London’s theaters closed for long stretches. Both were dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton, and they made Shakespeare’s name as a poet years before it appeared on the title page of a play.
The other two are shorter and stranger. The Phoenix and the Turtle appeared in 1601 in a collection of poems by several writers, and A Lover’s Complaint was printed in 1609 at the end of the first edition of the Sonnets.
A fifth book, The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), was sold under Shakespeare’s name, but only five of its twenty poems are known to be his: two sonnets and three passages from his play Love’s Labour’s Lost.
Below, each of the four poems is summarized with its date and form. Those with a full analysis are linked.
What happens in each poem, how it is written, and when it first appeared.
1,194 lines in six-line stanzas rhymed ABABCC
Venus, the goddess of love, falls for the beautiful young Adonis and tries every argument to win him, but he wants only to go hunting. The next day he is killed by a wild boar, and Venus, grieving, prophesies that love will always be joined with sorrow. Based on a story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, it was Shakespeare’s first published work and one of the most popular poems of its day.
Read the analysis1,855 lines in seven-line stanzas (rhyme royal)
In ancient Rome, Tarquin, the king’s son, rapes Lucrece, the virtuous wife of his fellow soldier Collatine. She summons her husband and father, tells them what happened, names her attacker and takes her own life. Their revenge drives the Tarquins from Rome and ends the rule of kings.
Read the analysis67 lines: thirteen quatrains and a lament in five tercets
A funeral for a phoenix and a turtledove whose love made them one. Reason itself cannot explain their union, and their deaths, the poem says, leave truth and beauty buried with them.
Read the analysis329 lines in seven-line stanzas (rhyme royal)
A young woman sits weeping by a river, tearing up love letters and throwing away gifts. She tells an old man how a charming young man seduced and abandoned her, and ends by admitting she would fall for him all over again.
Read the analysisThe sonnets, and the history behind how these poems reached print.