A reading of a classic Shakespeare sonnet ‘When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced’ is one of the more famous sonnets by Shakespeare, and, like Sonnet 60, has a fairly straightforward sentiment at its heart. Also, like Sonnet 60, it is a meditation on the destructive power of […]
A reading of a classic Shakespeare sonnet Widely regarded as one of the finest of all the Sonnets, Sonnet 60, beginning ‘Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, / So do our minutes hasten to their end’, is a meditation on mortality, with Shakespeare once again proposing that […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments’ is one of the more famous poems in Shakespeare’s sequence of 154 sonnets. The poem is a version of the popular conceit that the poet’s words can make his lover immortal through ‘rhyme’. As commentators are quick to […]
A summary of Shakespeare’s 53rd sonnet ‘What is your substance, whereof are you made, / That millions of strange shadows on you tend?’ Sonnet 53 is pored over and analysed by Cyril Graham in Oscar Wilde’s brilliant short story ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ (1889), about a man who […]
A summary of Shakespeare’s 52nd sonnet Sonnet 52 is another poem about absence, and about Shakespeare having to be apart from the Fair Youth. The rather dense and knotty conceit, which centres on locked-up treasure, requires a bit of untangling and closer analysis, but first, here is Sonnet 52 and […]