Sonnet 145: Those Lips That Love's Own Hand Did Make
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Those lips that love's own hand did make
Breathed forth the sound that said 'I hate' To me that languished for her sake, But when she saw my woeful state, Straight in her heart did mercy come, Chiding that tongue that ever sweet Was used in giving gentle doom, And taught it thus anew to greet: 'I hate' she altered with an end That followed it as gentle day Doth follow night who like a fiend From heaven to hell is flown away. 'I hate' from hate away she threw And saved my life saying 'not you'. |
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Those lips that love's own hand did make
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Those lips that were made by love's own hand.
'Love' in the Quarto Edition is capitalised and editors appear of a mind that it must refer to either Cupid or Venus, though there is no reason to believe that Shakespeare could not simply be thinking of love itself as the personified maker of the lips of the person he is talking about. |
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Breathed forth the sound that said 'I hate'
To me that languished for her sake, |
They, those lips, breathed forth – which suggests they whispered or spoke softly – the words 'I hate', and they did so to me, who I pined for her, or suffered in a state of weakness or even melancholy because of her.
We know for certain therefore the poem speaks of a woman, and although it is often disregarded as a 'trifle', it cleverly sets up our expectation that the woman means to say she hates the poet, something that soon enough will turn out not to be the case. |
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But when she saw my woeful state,
Straight in her heart did mercy come, |
But no sooner did she see what woeful state I was in than mercy entered her heart; in other words, she immediately took pity on me as soon as she saw how I suffered because of her.
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Chiding that tongue that ever sweet
Was used in giving gentle doom, |
And this mercy or pity now chided or rebuked the tongue which had just been used to pronounce this mild sentence on me, whereby the tongue is 'ever sweet' because it belongs to a lovely, sweet person.
This couple of lines may strike us as somewhat contradictory, as being told 'I hate' would scarcely qualify as a 'gentle doom' if it were followed with 'you'. But Shakespeare is clearly talking about someone who is mild-mannered, and here he prepares the ground for the perfect volta that turns around the entire meaning of the sonnet in the closing couplet. Several editors interpret 'was used' to mean 'was habitually used', or was 'accustomed to being used', which would imply that the woman Shakespeare speaks of often or regularly passed 'mild sentence' on him. This, while not mandatory, is a possible, and possibly fully intended, secondary meaning, which would somewhat support the idea that the woman in question is Shakespeare's wife Anne, and it may also, as it happens, support the less widely espoused notion that the sonnet, far from being a piece of juvenilia, was composed after many years of marriage to someone whom the poet therefore knows very well. |
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And taught it thus anew to greet:
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And the mercy which had entered her heart and chided her tongue now taught this tongue to greet me in a new way, as follows:
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'I hate' she altered with an end
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She changed the words, or rather the meaning of the words, 'I hate' by adding to them an ending, which, quite appropriately, is not yet spelt out but kept in suspense until the very end of the poem...
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That followed it as gentle day
Doth follow night who like a fiend From heaven to hell is flown away. |
...and this ending is one that follows the words 'I hate' as day follows night, which is thus being chased away by the soft kindness of the day, much as a fiend or bad spirit or evil angel is cast out from heaven, down to hell.
That day follows night is both proverbial and a genuine truism, and editors rather fall over themselves to express disdain for its use here. Katherine Duncan-Jones in the Arden Edition calls it "a tediously obvious analogy," and John Kerrigan in the Penguin Edition "a tritely commonplace example of inevitability." Both also cite Polonius in Hamlet Act I, Scene 3, where he counsels his son Laertes on how to conduct himself as he is about to depart to study in Paris and concludes: This above all: to thine own self be true; And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. This, Polonius's much mocked general pomposity notwithstanding, is actually sound advice and serves, if anything, as a perfect case in point for the use of a proverbial commonplace, however trite, being fully justified. Beyond that though, ridiculing Shakespeare for using such a familiar trope really misses the point: if the words that he is about to reveal to us follow 'I hate' as day follows night, then that makes this an established, predictable certainty. It tells us that our Will is really very sure of the outcome he is about to declare, and that makes this relationship a particular one; it, too, strongly supports the contention that the woman he is referring to is his wife Anne, because of no-one else could he be so emphatically certain that their 'I hate' be followed by what comes next, as day follows night. The introduction, meanwhile, at this exact moment of a 'fiend', for which read a 'bad angel' that is 'flown away' from heaven to hell, may yet turn out to be far more significant than at first glance meets the eye, and editors rightly note that this would appear to directly reference the previous sonnet, which raises further important questions about the timing of its composition on the one hand and the positioning of the sonnet in the collection on the other. And we shall, of course, examine those in more detail... PRONUNCIATION: Note that heaven here as so often is pronounced as one syllable: hean. |
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'I hate' from hate away she threw
And saved my life, saying 'not you'. |
She took away the meaning of the words 'I hate' by throwing them away from hate itself, and she saved my life by adding this ending, finally now revealed as her saying 'not you', returning thus: 'I hate not you'.
The construction 'from hate away she threw' is truly unusual and so the suggestion, first aired by Professor Andrew Gurr in 1971, that 'hate away' is a pun on the name Hathaway appears highly plausible. He cogently argues that the pronunciation of the phrase 'hate away' and the name Hathaway would have been virtually identical at the time, and Stephen Booth in his analytically commentated edition of the Sonnets six years later furthermore suggests also that the fragment 'And saved my life' would have sounded quite similar to 'Anne saved my life' in Shakespeare's day. Gurr concludes from his discovery that Sonnet 145 must therefore be an early poem, composed in 1582, when Shakespeare was 18 and about to marry Anne, and both these conjectures have since been widely – though by no means universally – adopted by Shakespeare scholars. I consider the former sound, the latter, by contrast, deeply flawed, for reasons we are just about to delve into... |
Sonnet 145 stands out in the collection for several reasons. Some factual, some conjectural, some somewhere in-between. Most obviously and beyond interpretation evident is the fact that it is the only poem composed in iambic tetrameter: it consists of 14 lines of eight syllables each, in contrast to the iambic pentameters present in all the other sonnets, giving each line of those ten or eleven syllables.
Also still difficult to dispute, though already in the realm of opinion, is the observation, so as not to say contention, put forward by many scholars and commentators, that the sonnet is poetically, stylistically, literarily 'slight': it strikes a simple tone, uses some extremely familiar imagery and analogy, and is, as far as we can tell, mostly devoid of the high level compositional and rhetorical devices used in many of the other, 'regular', sonnets.
Pure supposition, though intelligent and fully valid as a suggestion, is the idea that the sonnet puns on the name Hathaway and is therefore not about the Dark Lady or any other mistress, but about Shakespeare's wife, Anne; and even more adventurous is the conjecture drawn from it that therefore the poem be an early stab of Shakespeare's at as-yet-imperfect sonneteering: there is absolutely no proof that this is so, and it is just as conceivable that Shakespeare with Sonnet 145 deliberately and most intentionally not only employs a different format but also aims for a categorically different tone.
The thought of a young Will, aged 18, in love with the eight years older Anne Hathaway, who already is, or is soon to be, pregnant with his child and whom he therefore rather more hastily than ordinarily would be the case shall wed, penning a love poem to the woman who has either just now, or maybe has regularly, rejected his advances, making not unkind and therefore gentle noises to the effect of 'I hate' or at least 'I do not love', and who now has come around and embraced him with the negation of the negative to say 'I hate not you', meaning 'I love you too' — this thought is not unattractive. It suits our own perception of what a romantic love should be, it presents us the poet as a fundamentally good and healthy young man who loves his wife-to-be and considers her to be his lifesaver, and it gives due importance and status to Anne Shakespeare as the principal woman in Shakespeare's life.
Caution though is called for. Ideas are wonderful things, so long as that's what they're allowed to be. What is extremely problematic is when they are presented as incontrovertible truths.
There is a television programme in which Melvyn Bragg, a thoroughly competent, supremely charming, and highly respected writer and broadcaster of near national treasure standing in the UK and international fame, positions himself in front of a house in Stratford-upon-Avon and declares as absolute fact that this is where William Shakespeare penned his first ever sonnet, to his wife-to-be, Anne, meaning Sonnet 145. We have no evidence of this. At all. It may be so, it may just as easily not be so.
William Shakespeare, this much almost everyone can agree on, is an extremely skilled poet. He can vary his register at will, he can do bawdy, he can do bathos, he can do profound pathos, he obviously can do drama: comedy, tragedy, history. He can do long narrative poems on classical themes, he certainly can do sonnets. And either he himself or somebody who knew the sonnets well placed this poem at position 145, directly after the sonnet in the sequence that effectively concludes the complex, intricately involved, multi-layered, and sexually sophisticated triangular relationship between him and his mistress and his young man. And it doesn't do so randomly, accidentally, or without connection.
John Kerrigan in the Penguin Edition of the Sonnets writes: "More than any other sonnet, 145 casts doubt on the order and authority of Q [the Quarto Edition]. Yet even here – it cannot be too strongly said – thematic links with what precedes and follows the poem in Q are evident: fiend, heaven, and hell in lines 11-12 help it blend into context. However aberrant 145 may be in form, whatever its date of composition, and despite its original tenor (apparently describing a wife rather than a mistress), it fits into the collection. More importantly, there is no other place where it could fit half so well..."
Stephen Booth, also entertaining the possibility, favoured by some, that the poem might not be Shakespeare's at all: "If we are to believe that 145 is spurious, we must assume that it was chosen and placed by a literary pirate who was either improbably careful or improbably serendipitous."
We ignore this at our peril. Could it be that William Shakespeare, or someone on his behalf, either with or without his permission, grabbed hold of a very early poem and plonked it into the collection where they felt it somehow fits? It is possible. How likely though is that really? Compared to the possibility that William Shakespeare, having written dozens upon dozens of poems to his young male lover and to his mistress, comes to the end of a phase in his life and consciously creates a poetic caesura: a break with the flow, a cut from the themes and the persons talked about; that he now writes a simple poem about a – by comparison – simple relationship which has, after all, lasted the course. About a woman who may not have excited him perhaps as much as his – by his own account several – lovers, both male and female, but who has always been there. Who is the mother of his children. Whom he will return to. Whom he has never abandoned, never really left, nor ever will.
And it is a poem, after all, that in these simple terms speaks of forgiveness. Of a love that lasts. William Shakespeare, whether or not he is directly responsible for the compilation and publication of these sonnets in 1609, is certainly alive and well then, and so is Anne. We don't know whether Anne was literate or not, we don't know if she ever accompanied Shakespeare to London or not. For a long time it was assumed that she never left Stratford, but as recently as early 2025 some tantalising though still thin and unprovable indications suggested that maybe she did in the latter years of William's London career actually stay with him there. What we do know is that Will returns to Stratford sometime between about 1610 to 1613, in other words, very shortly after the publication of The Sonnets, and that he spends the rest of his life mostly there, with Anne.
This also allows for the line 'and saved my life' to make quite a bit more sense than it otherwise would. A woman whom you love not loving you back to a young man may indeed be a catastrophe that feels like the end of all existence, but for a relatively young Anne saying to a very young Will, 'I do not hate you' to be a lifesaver is something of a stretch. If, on the other hand, these words are spoken to a man by his wife after many years of marriage when he is perhaps getting ready to put an end to all his philandering and return to her and their home, then a life that is now firmly established can thus truly be saved.
And yet another detail speaks in favour of the sonnet being a late rather than an early poem: 'I hate not you' can of course simply mean 'I love you'. But it can also mean, 'I hate not you, but I hate that which you have done; or I hate the people whom you have been this close to; or I hate someone or something else: not you.' Whether or not this is intended, we don't know, but if it is, and the possibility certainly exists, then this would once again point towards the response of a woman who forgives after many years of marriage, not of one who is about to accept marriage.
If William Shakespeare did compile the collection himself and caused it to be published, it is not at all improbable that he may have wished to include in it a poem that clearly, obviously does not speak of the mistress and the lover but of the wife who, after all, forgives him his many trespasses. And it is not implausible that he may deliberately have kept this in a tone that reminds both him and her of the years when they were both much younger. Perhaps he even, without wishing to patronise Anne, intentionally kept it in a tone that a person who isn't part of a set of poets and doesn't spend her day conducting acrobatics in language can understand in one go, without footnotes, fuss, or explanation.
These sonnets are enormously revealing. This sonnet may, therefore, well be an acknowledgment of conciliation that sits exactly where it should, and that therefore has a wholly and consciously intended function in the canon.
There is, we must stress, no proof of this either. As with virtually everything when it comes to these sonnets, and as I keep emphasising, because I must: everything is conjecture, except the words.
The words though connect this sonnet directly to the previous three, and it creates a proper break in the flow directly after a sonnet that has effectively climaxed the series. The next sonnet addresses itself to the soul and meditates on death and dying, before the collection briefly returns once more to the Dark Lady, painting the poet's desire for her in stark, unflattering, even desolate terms only, to finally then conclude on the two classical allegories, thematically identical to each other, in Sonnets 153 and 154.
Sonnet 145, then, is not just a 'break in transmission', it also links the perhaps most explicitly sexual and sexually unconventional Sonnet 144 to the most religiously soul-searching Sonnet 146. And that is hard to believe to be a coincidence.
How 'slight' then is Sonnet 145 really? It so depends on what we see in it, and that in turn depends on how we see our Will. Assuming it is Will's, which is safe enough to do. If it isn't William Shakespeare's and has somehow crept in here by mistake, then in terms of its significance to him and our understanding of him, we can effectively disregard it. In view of the highly plausible pun on Anne Hathaway though, that likelihood is in itself so slim as to be negligible.
If it is an early work of Shakespeare's, then its slightness is mostly what there is to it: it is then a youthful play with and on words that may still capture a significant moment in the young man's and the slightly older woman's story, but that then more or less is that.
If it isn't an early work at all, but one composed either around the time of these trials and tribulations or even later, near the time of publication, to stand out and mark a moment of change and a gesture of redemption, then this isn't so slight after all. Then it turns into a confident compositional axis around which the collection now swivels once more: if we grant William Shakespeare agency in his own writing and assume that he knows what he's doing, then he very clearly has an intent with this sonnet that reaches far beneath the supposedly trivial surface.
Against which you may hear the argument: but halt! The pun is on Hathaway! Anne's maiden name! To take this, though, as evidence that the poem 'must have been' written before they were married, would be truly pedestrian: it would negate William Shakespeare the ability to abstract his marital status from his relation to a woman who absolutely still has her own identity, and require him to work only with the legal name his wife now carries. To demand such literal-mindedness from the greatest poet ever to have lived and created in the English language were to reduce him to the slightest, most trivial imbecile indeed.
And so I favour the supposition – and it is only that, there are no knowable, provable facts, only likelihoods and greater or lesser levels of plausible probability – that yes, the poem is Shakespeare's; yes, it puns on Anne's name and is about her; but no: it isn't therefore an early work, a precursor so to speak to the 'real' sonnets. Far more likely it is a poem composed by the mature poet deliberately in this form and style to serve its most particular purpose in the collection. And as you will know if you've been listening to me on this podcast, I also hold that in the absence on certainty, likelihood is our friend...
Also still difficult to dispute, though already in the realm of opinion, is the observation, so as not to say contention, put forward by many scholars and commentators, that the sonnet is poetically, stylistically, literarily 'slight': it strikes a simple tone, uses some extremely familiar imagery and analogy, and is, as far as we can tell, mostly devoid of the high level compositional and rhetorical devices used in many of the other, 'regular', sonnets.
Pure supposition, though intelligent and fully valid as a suggestion, is the idea that the sonnet puns on the name Hathaway and is therefore not about the Dark Lady or any other mistress, but about Shakespeare's wife, Anne; and even more adventurous is the conjecture drawn from it that therefore the poem be an early stab of Shakespeare's at as-yet-imperfect sonneteering: there is absolutely no proof that this is so, and it is just as conceivable that Shakespeare with Sonnet 145 deliberately and most intentionally not only employs a different format but also aims for a categorically different tone.
The thought of a young Will, aged 18, in love with the eight years older Anne Hathaway, who already is, or is soon to be, pregnant with his child and whom he therefore rather more hastily than ordinarily would be the case shall wed, penning a love poem to the woman who has either just now, or maybe has regularly, rejected his advances, making not unkind and therefore gentle noises to the effect of 'I hate' or at least 'I do not love', and who now has come around and embraced him with the negation of the negative to say 'I hate not you', meaning 'I love you too' — this thought is not unattractive. It suits our own perception of what a romantic love should be, it presents us the poet as a fundamentally good and healthy young man who loves his wife-to-be and considers her to be his lifesaver, and it gives due importance and status to Anne Shakespeare as the principal woman in Shakespeare's life.
Caution though is called for. Ideas are wonderful things, so long as that's what they're allowed to be. What is extremely problematic is when they are presented as incontrovertible truths.
There is a television programme in which Melvyn Bragg, a thoroughly competent, supremely charming, and highly respected writer and broadcaster of near national treasure standing in the UK and international fame, positions himself in front of a house in Stratford-upon-Avon and declares as absolute fact that this is where William Shakespeare penned his first ever sonnet, to his wife-to-be, Anne, meaning Sonnet 145. We have no evidence of this. At all. It may be so, it may just as easily not be so.
William Shakespeare, this much almost everyone can agree on, is an extremely skilled poet. He can vary his register at will, he can do bawdy, he can do bathos, he can do profound pathos, he obviously can do drama: comedy, tragedy, history. He can do long narrative poems on classical themes, he certainly can do sonnets. And either he himself or somebody who knew the sonnets well placed this poem at position 145, directly after the sonnet in the sequence that effectively concludes the complex, intricately involved, multi-layered, and sexually sophisticated triangular relationship between him and his mistress and his young man. And it doesn't do so randomly, accidentally, or without connection.
John Kerrigan in the Penguin Edition of the Sonnets writes: "More than any other sonnet, 145 casts doubt on the order and authority of Q [the Quarto Edition]. Yet even here – it cannot be too strongly said – thematic links with what precedes and follows the poem in Q are evident: fiend, heaven, and hell in lines 11-12 help it blend into context. However aberrant 145 may be in form, whatever its date of composition, and despite its original tenor (apparently describing a wife rather than a mistress), it fits into the collection. More importantly, there is no other place where it could fit half so well..."
Stephen Booth, also entertaining the possibility, favoured by some, that the poem might not be Shakespeare's at all: "If we are to believe that 145 is spurious, we must assume that it was chosen and placed by a literary pirate who was either improbably careful or improbably serendipitous."
We ignore this at our peril. Could it be that William Shakespeare, or someone on his behalf, either with or without his permission, grabbed hold of a very early poem and plonked it into the collection where they felt it somehow fits? It is possible. How likely though is that really? Compared to the possibility that William Shakespeare, having written dozens upon dozens of poems to his young male lover and to his mistress, comes to the end of a phase in his life and consciously creates a poetic caesura: a break with the flow, a cut from the themes and the persons talked about; that he now writes a simple poem about a – by comparison – simple relationship which has, after all, lasted the course. About a woman who may not have excited him perhaps as much as his – by his own account several – lovers, both male and female, but who has always been there. Who is the mother of his children. Whom he will return to. Whom he has never abandoned, never really left, nor ever will.
And it is a poem, after all, that in these simple terms speaks of forgiveness. Of a love that lasts. William Shakespeare, whether or not he is directly responsible for the compilation and publication of these sonnets in 1609, is certainly alive and well then, and so is Anne. We don't know whether Anne was literate or not, we don't know if she ever accompanied Shakespeare to London or not. For a long time it was assumed that she never left Stratford, but as recently as early 2025 some tantalising though still thin and unprovable indications suggested that maybe she did in the latter years of William's London career actually stay with him there. What we do know is that Will returns to Stratford sometime between about 1610 to 1613, in other words, very shortly after the publication of The Sonnets, and that he spends the rest of his life mostly there, with Anne.
This also allows for the line 'and saved my life' to make quite a bit more sense than it otherwise would. A woman whom you love not loving you back to a young man may indeed be a catastrophe that feels like the end of all existence, but for a relatively young Anne saying to a very young Will, 'I do not hate you' to be a lifesaver is something of a stretch. If, on the other hand, these words are spoken to a man by his wife after many years of marriage when he is perhaps getting ready to put an end to all his philandering and return to her and their home, then a life that is now firmly established can thus truly be saved.
And yet another detail speaks in favour of the sonnet being a late rather than an early poem: 'I hate not you' can of course simply mean 'I love you'. But it can also mean, 'I hate not you, but I hate that which you have done; or I hate the people whom you have been this close to; or I hate someone or something else: not you.' Whether or not this is intended, we don't know, but if it is, and the possibility certainly exists, then this would once again point towards the response of a woman who forgives after many years of marriage, not of one who is about to accept marriage.
If William Shakespeare did compile the collection himself and caused it to be published, it is not at all improbable that he may have wished to include in it a poem that clearly, obviously does not speak of the mistress and the lover but of the wife who, after all, forgives him his many trespasses. And it is not implausible that he may deliberately have kept this in a tone that reminds both him and her of the years when they were both much younger. Perhaps he even, without wishing to patronise Anne, intentionally kept it in a tone that a person who isn't part of a set of poets and doesn't spend her day conducting acrobatics in language can understand in one go, without footnotes, fuss, or explanation.
These sonnets are enormously revealing. This sonnet may, therefore, well be an acknowledgment of conciliation that sits exactly where it should, and that therefore has a wholly and consciously intended function in the canon.
There is, we must stress, no proof of this either. As with virtually everything when it comes to these sonnets, and as I keep emphasising, because I must: everything is conjecture, except the words.
The words though connect this sonnet directly to the previous three, and it creates a proper break in the flow directly after a sonnet that has effectively climaxed the series. The next sonnet addresses itself to the soul and meditates on death and dying, before the collection briefly returns once more to the Dark Lady, painting the poet's desire for her in stark, unflattering, even desolate terms only, to finally then conclude on the two classical allegories, thematically identical to each other, in Sonnets 153 and 154.
Sonnet 145, then, is not just a 'break in transmission', it also links the perhaps most explicitly sexual and sexually unconventional Sonnet 144 to the most religiously soul-searching Sonnet 146. And that is hard to believe to be a coincidence.
How 'slight' then is Sonnet 145 really? It so depends on what we see in it, and that in turn depends on how we see our Will. Assuming it is Will's, which is safe enough to do. If it isn't William Shakespeare's and has somehow crept in here by mistake, then in terms of its significance to him and our understanding of him, we can effectively disregard it. In view of the highly plausible pun on Anne Hathaway though, that likelihood is in itself so slim as to be negligible.
If it is an early work of Shakespeare's, then its slightness is mostly what there is to it: it is then a youthful play with and on words that may still capture a significant moment in the young man's and the slightly older woman's story, but that then more or less is that.
If it isn't an early work at all, but one composed either around the time of these trials and tribulations or even later, near the time of publication, to stand out and mark a moment of change and a gesture of redemption, then this isn't so slight after all. Then it turns into a confident compositional axis around which the collection now swivels once more: if we grant William Shakespeare agency in his own writing and assume that he knows what he's doing, then he very clearly has an intent with this sonnet that reaches far beneath the supposedly trivial surface.
Against which you may hear the argument: but halt! The pun is on Hathaway! Anne's maiden name! To take this, though, as evidence that the poem 'must have been' written before they were married, would be truly pedestrian: it would negate William Shakespeare the ability to abstract his marital status from his relation to a woman who absolutely still has her own identity, and require him to work only with the legal name his wife now carries. To demand such literal-mindedness from the greatest poet ever to have lived and created in the English language were to reduce him to the slightest, most trivial imbecile indeed.
And so I favour the supposition – and it is only that, there are no knowable, provable facts, only likelihoods and greater or lesser levels of plausible probability – that yes, the poem is Shakespeare's; yes, it puns on Anne's name and is about her; but no: it isn't therefore an early work, a precursor so to speak to the 'real' sonnets. Far more likely it is a poem composed by the mature poet deliberately in this form and style to serve its most particular purpose in the collection. And as you will know if you've been listening to me on this podcast, I also hold that in the absence on certainty, likelihood is our friend...
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If you spot a mistake or if you have any comments or suggestions, please use the contact page to get in touch.
To be kept informed of developments, please subscribe to the email list.
If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!