Download Complete Poetry: Sonnets and Narrative Poems AudioBook Free
The sonnets are a collection numbering 154 poems interacting with themes like the passage of time, love, beauty, and mortality. They were probably written over a long period of Shakespeare's life up until 1609, when these were first published. The first 17 poems, usually known as the "procreation sonnets", are resolved to a man urging him to marry and have children to be able to immortalize his beauty by passing it to his descendants. The other sonnets: share the speaker's love for a man; brood after loneliness, death, and the transience of life; appear to criticize the son for preferring a rival poet; share ambiguity toward the speaker's mistress; and make a pun on the poet's name. The final two sonnets are allegorical recreations of Greek epigrams referring to the "little love-god" Cupid. Shakespeare's sonnets were highly affected by the Latin poet Horace. In 1593 and 1594 the London theaters were closed because of plague. Shakespeare turned to poetry and printed two narrative poems on erotic themes or templates, "Venus and Adonis", and "The Rape of Lucrece". In "Venus and Adonis", a vibrant Adonis rejects the intimate improvements of Venus; however in "The Rape of Lucrece", the virtuous partner Lucrece is raped by the lascivious Tarquin. Encouraged by Ovid's The Metamorphoses, the poems show the guilt and moral dilemma resulting from uncontrolled lust. A third narrative poem, "A Lover's Complaint", presents a young woman who laments her seduction by way of a persuasive suitor. "The Phoenix and the Turtle" mourns the deaths of the legendary phoenix and his fan, the faithful turtle dove.
