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:
‘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 a coda to the overall cycle.) […]
‘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 being rather slight. But not all […]