In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores perhaps the most enigmatic inscription in a book of poems ‘To the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets’: so begins perhaps the most puzzling poetic dedication in all of English literature. Here it is, in full:
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘In loving thee thou know’st I am forsworn’: so begins the antepenultimate sonnet in William Shakespeare’s Sonnets – there are still two more to go in the sequence – but the last sonnet to advance a new argument. (The final pair are more of […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem’: so begins the 54th sonnet in Shakespeare’s sequence of 154 poems. It’s not the most famous poem in the sequence by any means, and the sentiment it expresses is straightforward – perhaps to the point of […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The sovereign beauty which I do admire, / Witness the world how worthy to be praised’: so begins the third sonnet in Edmund Spenser’s 1595 sonnet sequence Amoretti, written to celebrate his own marriage to his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle. As love poems to […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Methought I Saw My Late Espousèd Saint’, sometimes known as ‘On His Deceased Wife’, is one of John Milton’s best-known sonnets. It’s a moving account of grief in the face of the loss of a loved one, and Milton – better known for his […]