Sonnets

Your favorites and why?

The actual "enactment" (e.g Gwyneth Paltrow's role in Shakespear in Love) of the effect of one of Shakespeare's sonnets, cause one to have a greater appreciation for the time and environment in which thse sonets were composed.

Sonnet 116.

Why? - Because

'Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds'

Sonnet 20, because I love all the ambiguities.

Sonnet 71, because I like to read it as if the speaker were playing the martyr.

Sonnet 73, because it is a perfect example of how a sonnet's structure works.

Sonnet 129. I call it "The Jimmy Swaggert Sonnet."

Sonnet 76 - in a series of Sonnets on love this sonnet is, for me, at the heart of the sonnets and on love and on the Sonnets themselves. It has a most wonderful sestet. But it's hard to choose a fav, maybe even wrong, perhaps.

Links to the mentioned sonnets, plus my fave:

• 20. A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted
• 23. As an unperfect actor on the stage
• 71. No longer mourn for me when I am dead
• 73. That time of year thou mayst in me behold
• 76. Why is my verse so barren of new pride?
• 116. Let me not to the marriage of true minds
• 129. The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
• 130. My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun

Updated to include following posts.

and this

Sonnet 76

Sonnet 23.

Shakespeare's subtlety and skill in writing between the lines.