Favorite Shakespeare Sonnet?

It's funny; if you ask "the man on the street" about Shakespearean Sonnets, he (or she) will usually come up with "Shall I compare thee..." which is one of the FEW poems in the sequence that are essentially TAME. Most of them are either HOT and LUSTY...or ANGRY and BITTER. Lots of poems of betrayal and mistrust.

It's very hard for me to narrow it down to one favorite, but, for the purposes of this question...let's go with #34 ("Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day...")

To paraphrase it roughly, the speaker of the poem asks: "Why did you lead me on and get me to commit myself to you, when you never intended to return my affections?" And then, as so often happens in the sonnets, the rhyming couplet in lines 13-14, provide a little bit of a "twist" ending:

"Ah, but those tears are pearls which thy love sheds,

And they are rich, and ransom all ill deeds."

Yeah, I know..."sheds" and "deeds" is an off-rhyme. Still, the poem works.

Favorite Shakespeare Sonnets

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The marriage of true minds. Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come: Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. The sonnet is about real love, that can defeat Time. Real and pure love does not change and can overstep the mark. Time kills beauty and youngness, but love is eternal.

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

It basically says that although we change and crap happens, true love endures.

Mine is Sonnet 18, which begins, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"

Sonnet 114!!!

We didn't learn the numbers at school, we did them by the first line. Mine is a little clichéd, but it has to be "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?".

Have you ever heard of La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Keats? You'd probably like that.

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