Shakespeare's Sonnets

Fourteen lines. That is the container Shakespeare uses to hold the entire weight of desire, jealousy, time, and beauty. Written in the final decade of Queen Elizabeth's reign, these 154 poems cracked open the English language and revealed what it was truly capable of. The sonnets divide into two great sequences. The first addresses a young man of breathtaking beauty, urging him to reproduce so that his face might outlive death. The speaker alternates between worship and despair, sometimes claiming the young man's eyes have "killed" him, sometimes begging him to wed. The second sequence centers on a "dark lady" whose charms the speaker cannot resist even as he knows she is unfaithful. Here, jealousy and lust replace idealized reverence. What emerges is a raw, contradictory portrait of love: not the sanitized romance of later centuries, but something fiercer and more honest. Certain lines have become so embedded in our consciousness:"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" "Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments":that we forget they were once revolutionary, written by a living, desperate man trying to capture something that kept slipping away.