Sonnets

Shakespeare answers the young man's excuse for staying single, that he fears leaving a widow, by showing that dying childless leaves a far greater grief: the entire world…

Shakespeare asks why a man who is himself like music hears it with sadness, and answers with a chord: harmony needs more than one note, and a life…

Shakespeare turns the sun’s daily arc into an argument about reputation, decline, and the necessity of a son. Sonnet 7: Full Poem Lo! in the orient when the…

Sonnet 6 presses the urgency of Sonnet 5 to its logical conclusion — if beauty must be preserved, the only vessel worthy of it is a child.

Sonnet 5 is the first poem in the sequence to make time itself the subject rather than the young man's failure to act against it.

Sonnet 129 is the most violent poem in the sequence — a controlled explosion of self-disgust at the machinery of lust.

Sonnet 30 turns the act of remembering into a form of grief, only to find that the thought of one person is enough to restore everything that was…

Sonnet 4 is not a poem about beauty — it is a legal brief against a man who has mismanaged someone else's assets.

Sonnet 3 is the first poem in the sequence to look backward — and that change of direction is what makes it different from everything that came before.

Sonnet 58 is a performance of patience — and the couplet is where the performance breaks.