Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Shakespeare begins with a beautiful young man who seems determined to keep all his beauty for himself. Against him, the poet sets time, inheritance—and a future in which the world may lose what it was never allowed to share.

Published in 1609, William Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets turn private longing into arguments about beauty, desire, friendship, jealousy and time. Their speaker can plead, praise, accuse and doubt, sometimes within the space of a few lines; in the opening poems, he urges his young addressee to leave something of himself behind before age and death claim their due. Yet the poet’s own verses are another kind of inheritance, made to preserve what flesh cannot. Can they outlast time—and what, exactly, does the speaker hope to keep?

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