Published in 1609, Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets form a sequence without a single agreed story. Their speakers address a beautiful young man, a rival poet, and a woman traditionally called the Dark Lady, but the poems continually unsettle those categories.
How a Shakespearean sonnet works
Most use fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, three quatrains, and a closing couplet, commonly rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The form creates an engine of thought: propose, complicate, turn, conclude—or refuse conclusion.
Good places to begin
- Sonnet 18: poetry and the preservation of beauty.
- Sonnet 29: despair transformed by remembered love.
- Sonnet 73: ageing through autumn, twilight, and dying fire.
- Sonnet 116: an ideal definition of constant love.
- Sonnet 130: desire without false poetic comparison.