Sonnets : William Shakespeare (Drama, Plays, Poetry, Shakespeare, Literary Criticism) [Annotated]

"Shakespeare's sonnets are a collection of 154 sonnets, dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality.

The first 17 poems, traditionally called the procreation sonnets, are addressed to a young man urging him to marry and have children in order to immortalize his beauty by passing it to the next generation.

Other sonnets express the speaker's love for a young man; brood upon loneliness, death, and the transience of life; seem to criticise the young man for preferring a rival poet; express ambiguous feelings for the speaker's mistress; and pun on the poet's name.

The final two sonnets are allegorical treatments of Greek epigrams referring to Cupid."