Main topics of the second ‘group.’
In two sonnets of the second ‘group’ (cxxvi.-clii.) the poet compliments his mistress on her black complexion and raven-black hair and eyes. In twelve sonnets he hotly denounces his ‘dark’ mistress for her proud disdain of his affection, and for her manifold infidelities with other men. Apparently continuing a theme of the first ‘group,’ the poet rebukes the woman, whom he addresses, for having beguiled his friend to yield himself to her seductions (cxxxiii.-cxxxvi.) Elsewhere he makes satiric reflections on the extravagant compliments paid to the fair sex by other sonnetteers (No. cxxx.)
or lightly quibbles on his name of ‘Will’ (cxxx.-vi.) In tone and subject-matter numerous sonnets in the second as in the first ‘group’ lack visible sign of coherence with those they immediately precede or follow.
It is not merely a close study of the text that confutes the theory, for which recent writers have fought hard, of a logical continuity in Thorpe’s arrangement of the poems in 1609. There remains the historic fact that readers and publishers of the seventeenth century acknowledged no sort of significance in the order in which the poems first saw the light. When the sonnets were printed for a second time in 1640—thirty-one years after their first appearance—they were presented in a completely different order. The short descriptive titles which were then supplied to single sonnets or to short sequences proved that the collection was regarded as a disconnected series of occasional poems in more or less amorous vein.