Customer Reviews

Love Poems & Sonnets of William Shakespeare

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To be quite truthful I must say that I found Shakespeare's sonnets a little hard to digest until I decided to roll up my intellectual sleeves and work at it, because I thought it would be good for me.

They are short and easy to read, but in order to get the most out of them I found a quiet place, where noone would laugh, and read them aloud.

By the time I got to sonnet #50 they were making sense. I began to highlight my favorite ones. Some of them I read to other people. One or two made me laugh, several moved me emotionally. When I was finished I felt richer for having made the effort.

It is not hard to give these poems and sonnets 5 stars.

HOWEVER I'm not sure you should purchase the book. I found some dated used copies of "The Sonnets of William Shakespeare with the famous Temple Notes and an introduction by Robert O. Ballou" on Amazon.com for $ .14 each. Yes, that's fourteen cents for small hardback copies in great shape. Sure they're dated, but for me the contents are more important than the commentaries, so age doesn't matter much.

This book is full of Shakespeare's work, so if you don't like the way he uses the English language do not get this book. On the other hand, if you do enjoy and understand his plays, (Everyone should be familiar with at least one. Remember highschool?)this book is a must! All of the poems deal with love; lost love, unforgettable love, forbidden love, everlasting love, obsessive love, first love, life changing love, ect.,ect. These poems seem to be telling a story, each one different, but as emotional as the one before. If you have a hard time letting someone know how you feel or putting your emotions into words, this book could be the answer. To the women, there are so many different Sonnets that I could relate to situations during my lifetime that seemed to be telling the story of my life. If you know an unromantic guy, this would be a great gift. This would help him sweep ladies off of their feet! Actually, this book would really be good for anyone of all ages, I mean, it IS filled with LOVE. It is a welcome change to the fast,unforgiving world we live in today!

There is no doubt that Shakespeare's overarching reputation as THE English dramatist had much to do with drawing attention away from this superb collection of love poems and left their aesthetic quality largely unappreciated by the general public. I, however, was fortunate to have discovered these delightful poems before the dull rote of the public education system could desensitize me from appreciating the fine arts.
Before I had read my very first word of Shakespeare in my high school English class, and before my teacher made me recite those stupid soliloquies in front of the whole class, and before I could even name a Shakespearean play outside of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, I read this book. Yes, this exact one and I still own it and to quote the publisher I "cherish" my copy.

But buyer beware. This edition of the sonnets contains absolutely no annotations, no paraphrases, no notes - nothing, except a very brief layman introduction on the front and back flaps basically appraising the quality of the Shakespeare's sonnets and his other poems. Of course, since any obscure or unfamiliar word can now be quickly explained with an internet search of Shakespeare fanatic websites or maybe Sparknotes, these annotations to alongside the pages are mainly for the convenience of the reader. But those resources were not available to me when I read Shakespeare for the first time.

Even as I struggled line-by-line to understand the ever famous Sonnet 18 printed on the back cover, and even as I repeatedly renewed my patience to give these enigmatic verses another chance, the greatness of Shakespeare was simply not becoming any more obvious to me. That was 8 years ago. Now in addition to owning several print copies of the sonnets, I have handwritten over the period of several years into my book my own notes, annotations, and individual words I had to look up. Fortunately, DoubleDay gives you plenty of blank space on the pages for that purpose.

Yes, these poems stand among the literary peaks of literary accomplishments ever since the ancient masters like Sapphos, Homer, Vergil first laid their geniuses to pen. These poems will continue to find rank as the greatest ever written alongside literary giants from Homer to Shelley, Perhaps they are secondary in quality to Shakespeare's main dramatic works. But to be honest, I'm not entirely convinced that this is true. However enduring the work, does 14 lines comparison of a man's beauty to a summer's day really stand up to the depth and scope of a behemoth like Hamlet or Macbeth? Probably not, but even Shakespeare was capable of publishing inferior quality lines, which is noticeable in his early comedies like Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which even Harold Bloom called a "bad play."

This depression in the quality we typically expect from the Shakespeare we read is also apparent the first of Shakespeare's published works, the long narrative poem "Venus and Adonis" also included in this copy. While the occasional employments of clever rhymes here and there, e.g. "Nature that made thee with herself at strife/ Saith that the world hath ending with thy life" may make following thousand or so lines more tolerable, it's marked by an overall doggerel diction and frequent break in the iambus.

In this respect, some of the sonnets are superior in my opinion. But of course this becomes problematic, since the sonnets were more or less intended to be read in the context of the individual rather than a whole string of repeating stanzas unifying the progression of a single story.

Some of the sonnets taken out of context might be suitable as a stand-alone; others are more baffling without the aid of some background. But the main thing is for people buying this book and expecting to read typical romantic mush a gentleman might woo a woman with is that these sonnets are not ideal for such a purpose. Some of them certainly are like 18, 23, 29, 30, just to name a couple. But most others you might notice they lack the passion characteristic of the writings of the late Romantic pioneers like Shelley, Keats, or Burns. It's love poetry nevertheless.

If you're anything like me, your heart will soar at reading such typically Shakespearean majesty riddled over a span of 154 individual sonnets. Your heart will resound with Shakespeare's flattering expressions of love and beauty(Sonnets 18, 29, 30, 91) - you will weep with him as he wallows in self-deprecation and despair (71, 72, 73). Some of the more difficult ones in my opinion, which are harder to grasp in scope, include 56, 75, 126, and many of the ones following ca. 126. Others revel on a myriad of philosophical topics concerning love, beauty, self-worth (93, 94, 95, 108, 109, 130), and many more on the idea of immortality in verse (contrast this theme from the underlying message of the first 17 sonnets). And some others I don't much care for including the famous "marriage" sonnet 116.

However, does being the greatest poem ever written guarantee that it will appeal to you? No. My experience with sharing poetry to other people has led me to believe that if you just don't like Shakespeare, then you don't like him. Period. One would only hope that a haphazard perusal of any of these lines would spark a sudden, deep curiosity to discover more. Such was the case, when I first came across the heart-warming message contained in the couplet of Sonnet 30: "But if the while I think on thee dear friend/ All losses are restored and sorrows end".

I have no doubt that these sonnets are matchless in their excellence, so more importantly for the sake of this review, I will quickly explain why I was not so impressed with this edition. First, there are multiple print errors in my copy. This may have been fixed but I had to deal with this for a couple of years thinking that it was actually "For thee against myself I'll vow debate/ For I must ne'er love whom thou dost hate" with the "ne'er" as counting two syllables when actually, the line goes, "For I must ne'er love HIM whom thou dost hate." Yea that makes more grammatical sense. Some words are more or less debatable. For example in the third line of Sonnet 108, I have it written, "What's new to speak, what new to register" but I have seen others that print "What's new to speak, what NOW to register." Others are just obvious proofreading shortcomings, like writing "hs" instead of "he" in a line of Venus and Adonis (don't have my copy at the moment so I can't remember which one).

I have stated before that this edition does not contain any annotations, introductions or references from academia, which are included now in virtually every single published edition of Shakespeare's works, except Dover. So many beginners may find it frustrating to deal with this as their first introduction to Shakespeare as was the case with me and may be on the way for a revelation for the proposals to group the sonnets based on common themes, say, on the theme of competing for favor of the beloved against the rival poet but even more broadly speaking, the division between the Young Man and Dark Lady Sonnets between 126 and 127. But again, this issue is resolved by many free resources available on the internet.

I owe some merit to this book, however, for including the another of Shakespeare's collection of short poems published under the name "The Passionate Pilgrim" which were thought to have been written by Shakespeare, including the famous "Come live with me and be my love", which I initially thought Marlowe had written. These poems are nowhere near the quality of writing found in the sonnets but it never hurts to have more available for the reader who has exhausted through the sequence of the sonnets (trust me, they get quite repetitive after a while). Also included are the narratives Venus and Adonis A Lover's Complaint, The Phoenix and the Turtle, and finally a very short anthology of love songs compiled from the plays such as Love's Labour's Lost, Hamlet and Cytherea. These "songs" are more lyrical in quality than the sonnets and are less restrained by the meter that governs the composition of the sonnet. It is actually quite nice to have them.

It came as a surprise to me, however, that this copy did not contain "The Rape of Lucrece."

In conclusion, the portion of the songs collected from his plays is the only thing I would find advantageous to having this DoubleDay copy of the Sonnets. Usually Shakespeare's narrative poems are contained I found myself starving for more information as I became more and more engrossed by these wonderful poems, but finding none here I looked elsewhere. Of course, it is never a bad thing to have an extra copy for taking your own notes in and/or for reference. Similar to those huge single volume Complete Works of Shakespeare that, except for maybe a short glossary, likewise don't contain any annotations in the interest of space. In my opinion there are better 10 dollars invested into an edition cheaper that still allows for full enjoyment of these landmark poems.