Sonnets

Read Sonnet 107 by William Shakespeare with full poem, meaning, themes, and a clear literary analysis.

Read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 75 with the full poem and a detailed analysis of its themes of desire, emotional hunger, and the cycles of love.

Sonnet 71 asks the youth to forget the speaker — and the reason given at the end is not love but fear.

Sonnet 17 closes the procreation sequence by admitting that poetry alone cannot do what it needs to do — and that a child alone cannot either.

Sonnet 15 is the hinge of the entire sequence — the poem where Shakespeare stops asking the youth to act and starts acting himself.

Read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 14 with the full poem and a detailed analysis of its themes of knowledge, prophecy, beauty, and legacy.

Sonnet 12 is the most patient poem in the procreation sequence — four images of decay stacked one upon another before the argument arrives, already almost too late.

Sonnet 2 does not argue with the young man — it shows him his future, and waits.

Sonnet 1 opens the entire sequence with a demand — and the demand is stranger than it first appears.

Sonnet 57 is a poem about total submission — and the speaker knows exactly how total it is.