ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the subject of Shake-Speares Sonnets and Afterlife in Lyric Poetry. The Shake-speares Sonnets repeatedly attribute abstractions to persons, so as to play off the possessed against the unmodified: "my love" and "love" or "our minutes" against "time." Katherine Duncan-Jones observes of the 1609 Quarto published by Thomas Thorpe: The title of Shakespeare's sonnets is Shakespeare's Sonnets. The consequence of the sophistication multiplying the referents of pronouns in Sonnets is that they haplessly disable the workings of the most powerful claim Shakespeare makes: to confer immortality on "thee" by means of these "black lines." Peter Lamarque observes that the "theme of Shakespeare's sonnet 65" is "easy to discern." It involves: the inescapability of time and the sadness of mortality with a hint that love might attain a kind of immortality through the written word, perhaps in the form of the sonnets themselves.
