Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Description

The collection comes with 154 sonnets accredited to Shakespeare and treating all of life’s major turning points and the emotions they conjure. Life, death, love, mortality and the passage of time all have their place in this wonderful volume, just like loneliness, beauty, disappointment and other complicated and powerful feelings. The sonnets come with no titles, being identified with numbers instead.

The first 17 sonnets are called the procreation sonnets and they are addressed to a young man, a contemporary of the poet, urging the later to get married and have children, while the others are addressed to various other characters such as the Dark Lady, the Fair Youth and the Rival Poet. Each of the sonnets tells a mini-story, narrates an event, important or small, then draws a conclusion at the end.

The sonnets are revolutionary in the choice of themes and in structure as well. Almost all poems consist of three quatrains, that is, three four-line parts and one couplet to sum up the sonnet. Most of them are written in the meter we know so well from Shakespeare’s play, the unrhymed iambic pentameter and all of them are in the most elevated Elizabethan English, sometimes difficult to make sense of, but always beautiful.

Shakespeare’s sonnets are much more than beautiful poems – they mark the beginning of a radically new and different way of speaking about life and love and they usher in modern poetry as we know it today. The metaphors, the imagery, the attitude expressed in these poems not only provide insight into what life and love meant in Shakespeare’s times, but they still perfectly describe the modern man as well – therefore, Shakespeare’s sonnets are of general interest and offer inspiration and delight for readers in the 21st century too.
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