William Shakespeare's poems

William Shakespeare is best known today for his plays, but in his time poetry was far more important to any writer’s literary reputation. Tradition has it that Shakespeare wrote his two long poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, during a period of forced unemployment in 1592–94, when an outbreak of the plague closed London’s theaters. The poems were published, respectively, in 1593 and 1594.

Shakespeare’s famous sonnets and another fairly lengthy poem, The Phoenix and Turtle, are also thought to date from early in his career. They were published some years later, perhaps without his permission. Scholars disagree about whether to attribute another poem, A Lover's Complaint, to Shakespeare. Still more of Shakespeare’s poems and songs can be found within the plays themselves.

Like his plays, Shakespeare’s poems are full of passages that remain embedded in our popular culture. Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”) is a fixture of wedding ceremonies, and Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”), Sonnet 29 (“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”), and Sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”)—to name only a few—are known and quoted in the same way that famous lines and passages are quoted from Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth.

Shakespeare's Sonnets

Few collections of poems intrigue, challenge, tantalize, and reward us as do Shakespeare’s Sonnets, all written in the English sonnet form. It is not just the beauty and power of individual sonnets that engage us, but the story that their sequence seems to tell about Shakespeare's love life, whenever one reads the Sonnets in the order in which they appear in the 1609 Quarto.

It goes something like this: The first 17 sonnets advise a beautiful young man to marry and produce a child. The next 109 sonnets urge the poet’s love for him and claim that the poems will preserve his beauty. The supposed narrative concludes with 28 sonnets to or about a "dark lady."

Evidence that puts the narrative in doubt seems to matter very little. Most critics and editors agree that the sonnets are only linked within specific clusters; they were written perhaps over many years and perhaps to or about different people. Only about 25 specify the sex of the beloved.

Yet such facts surrender to the narrative pull of the 1609 collection. The persona of the poet and the sequence of emotions are so strong that few editors can resist describing the Sonnets in terms of their irresistible story.

Lucrece

Shakespeare’s long poem Lucrece takes place as Rome becomes a republic. As a minor epic (a popular genre in Shakespeare's time), it centers on figures of seemingly secondary importance: Sextus Tarquinius, the king’s son, and Lucrece, the wife of his friend.

The poem focuses initially on Tarquin's desire for Lucrece, whom he rapes. Afterward, he feels bitter disappointment. Shakespeare then drives him from the poem, which shifts to Lucrece and her sense of sexual shame.

Shakespeare found these incidents in Roman history and myth, as well as Chaucer and contemporary English writers, but he incorporated another genre, the complaint, to supply interior monologues for both characters. Tarquin's complaint presents him as divided against himself, lusting for Lucrece but aware that raping her would, as he sees it, betray his friend and shame Tarquin and his family.

In her complaint, Lucrece struggles with the shame she feels, ultimately choosing suicide. Few acts have proved as controversial. In Roman culture, suicide could be a hero’s death, but Christianity has not agreed. Lucrece's view is that, despite the chastity of her mind, she has been rendered unchaste—that mind and body, in her reading, cannot be separated.

Venus and Adonis

With Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare launched his career as a poet. The poem is a minor epic, a genre that many poets in the 1590s chose for their first efforts. Characters in a minor epic usually come from the periphery of myth or legend; its interest is in eroticism, sophistication, and wit. Within this genre, Venus and Adonis was so successful that it was Shakespeare's most popular published work throughout his lifetime.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the boy hunter Adonis is the willing lover of Venus, the goddess of love, and dies accidentally. Shakespeare has Adonis reject Venus—an ironic and comic development for early readers. Venus endlessly argues for making love, with Adonis uttering petulant protests.

For modern readers who might forget that Venus is a goddess, it is easy to focus on Adonis as the uneasy object of desire by a matron. In its terms, however, the poem is a deliberately artificial retelling of a then-familiar myth, playing with the notion of what would happen if the goddess of love were refused.

Although minor epics fell out of fashion long ago, Venus and Adonis commands appreciation for its dazzling verbal surface, as a piece of fine baroque art. It also lets us see the young Shakespeare exploring love in a way that later yielded his romantic comedies.

The Phoenix and the Turtle

The poem by Shakespeare now known as “The Phoenix and Turtle,” or “The Phoenix and the Turtle," was first printed with no title; it was one of several additional poems in the 1601 publication of a long poem by Robert Chester.

In the classical tradition, the mythical phoenix consumes itself in fire, from the ashes of which another phoenix is born. In Shakespeare's poem, the phoenix is female and the turtle (that is, a turtledove) is male.

The poem has been interpreted in many ways. The phoenix and turtledove may die in a fire that produces a new phoenix—or may not produce offspring. Some see the poem as a celebration of their physical union. Others suggest that the two become one as they approach a Christian heaven, or offer a philosophical reading. Some even link them to historical figures, although such interpretations are no longer widely favored.

In the poem's first part, sometimes called the "session," birds assemble to sing the second part, or “anthem." The anthem celebrates the phoenix and turtle's love and introduces the figure of Reason. Reason composes the final “Threnos” (a dirge), which many find the most beautiful section.