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 a coda to the overall cycle.) Sonnet 152 is not one of the most famous or memorable sonnets Shakespeare wrote, and some commentators (such as Don Paterson in his enjoyable Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Commentary) have condemned it as misogynistic.
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 being rather slight.
But not all sonnets have to tie themselves up in knots with metaphysical conceits and complex metaphors.
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 one’s newlywed bride go, it must have made the young Elizabeth blush with pride; the sonnet flatters her beauty using the courtly language of the sonnet sequence.
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 religious epic poem Paradise Lost – manages to say a great deal in just 14 lines. ‘Methought I Saw My Late Espousèd Saint’ was composed in 1658.