The consummate exemplar of the Elizabethan love affair with the sonnet, Shakespeare’s sequence of 154 fourteen-line poems is replete with luxurious, and lingering, literary melodies. Music amply rewards any reader’s attention, yet there is more to The Sonnets than a considerable catalog of lovely and quotable lines. Much has been made of the mysterious muses who incite the poet’s fancy: The first 126 poems are addressed to a young man, and sonnets 127 to 152 address a woman who has become known as “the dark lady” (the last two sonnets draw portraits of Cupid). And yet, despite the fact that Shakespeare exploits every trope of amorous verse, the real extended subject of these rhymes is the triumph of verse over the vagaries of time.
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