‘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 […]
‘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 […]