"The sun ariseth in his majesty
Who doth the world so gloriously behold,
That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold."
It is full of the images of delicate quick-blooded things going swiftly and lustily from the boiling of the April in them.
The Rape of Lucrece.—This poem was published in 1594, with a dedication to the Earl of Southampton. Like so many of the works of Shakespeare, it describes at length the prompting, acting, and results of a treachery inspired by an obsession. Tarquin, hearing of Lucrece's chastity, longs to attempt her. Coming stealthily to her home, in her lord's absence, he foully ravishes her. She kills herself and he is banished from Rome. The subject is not unlike that of Venus and Adonis, with the sexes reversed. In both poems the subject is sexual obsession and its results.
Lucrece is a wiser and a finer poem than Venus and Adonis. It is constructed with the art of a man familiar with the theatre. The delaying of the great moments so as to heighten the expectation, is contrived with rapturous energy. The poem is heaped and overflowing with the abundance of imaginative power. The wealth of the young man's mind is poured out like life in June.
It is strange that both Lucrece and Hamlet, in their moments of distraction, turn to the image of Troy blazing with the punishment of treachery.
The Passionate Pilgrim.—This little collection of poems was published in 1599, under Shakespeare's name, by William Jaggard, a dishonest bookseller. It contains poems by Richard Barnfield, Bartholomew Griffin, Christopher Marlowe, and one or more unknown hands. It also contains two genuine Shakespearean sonnets, three more from the text of Love's Labour's Lost, and three (less certainly his) on the subject of Venus and Adonis, which have the ring of his freshest youthful manner. Whether any others in the collection be by Shakespeare can only be a matter of opinion. The nineteenth poem has a smack of his mind about it. If it be by him it must be his earliest extant work.
The Sonnets.—Written between 1592 and 1609. Published (piratically) 1609.
These personal poems have puzzled many readers. Many writers have tried to interpret them. Although their first editor tells us that they are "serene, cleare, and elegantlie plaine (with) no intricate and cloudie stuffe to trouble and perplex the intellect," much good and bad brain work has been spent on them. Some have held that they are poetical exercises. Others find that they are confessions. Others wrest from dark lines dark meanings, till they have laid bare a story from them. Others interpret spiritually. Others find evidence in them that Shakespeare was guilty of an abnormal form of passion. The facts about them may be stated—