The sonnets are a collection numbering 154 poems dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty, and mortality. They were probably written over a long period of Shakespeare's life up until 1609, when they were first printed. The first 17 poems, traditionally referred to as the procreation sonnets, are addressed to a young man urging him to marry and have children in order to immortalize his beauty by passing it on to his descendants.
The other sonnets: express the speaker's love for a young man; brood upon loneliness, death, and the transience of life; appear to criticize the young man for preferring a rival poet; express ambiguity toward the speaker's mistress; and make a pun on the poet's name. The final two sonnets are allegorical recreations of Greek epigrams referring to the little love-god Cupid. Shakespeare's sonnets were strongly influenced by the Latin poet Horace.
In 1593 and 1594 the London theaters were closed because of plague. Shakespeare turned to poetry and published two narrative poems on erotic themes, Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece. In Venus and Adonis, a youthful Adonis rejects the sexual advances of Venus; but in The Rape of Lucrece, the virtuous wife Lucrece is raped by the lascivious Tarquin. Inspired by Ovid's The Metamorphoses, the poems show the guilt and moral confusion resulting from uncontrolled lust. A third narrative poem, A Lover's Complaint, presents a young woman who laments her seduction by a persuasive suitor. The Phoenix and the Turtle mourns the deaths of the legendary phoenix and his lover, the faithful turtle dove.
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"I enjoyed reading these for the most part. I mean, I wouldn't go out of my way to read them again, but I'm still giving it 4 stars because who am I to give Shakespeare less than 4 stars? A lot of them were on the theme of "I love you so much, so I am going to write this poem so that you will live on in eternity", which they did, but we don't actually know who he is writing about so he's kind of a liar. My favourites were 71, 91, 105, and 109. I made that list so I knew which ones to go back and look for should I have ever need a sonnet. In general I preferred the ones that were later on in the arrangement because I found they were a bit more serious. Apparently I like tragic poems. Also, there were some of them I couldn't make out at all, but I just gave up and moved on. All and all I am glad I read them, but probably won't be able to quote them anymore than I could before, so y'all are just going to have to believe that I read them."
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Nadine (4 out of 5 stars)