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The Bard’s sonnets include some of the greatest individual love poems in the English language. Though they comprise long poems. The sonnets do not come up to reason but are complicated at some point, very bizzare. There is no easy narrative and the mood keeps changing with comforting experiences and bitter illusions. With its rapid shift of moods, Shakespeare sends us screeching down a road of no return.

I, for one who knew Shakespeare even before I could spell his name, is still trapped in its mysteries. It accounts for the absence of its popularity and did Shakespeare follow them with The lover’s complaint to answer the mystery hidden within its folds? It is true that Shakespeare’s genius as a dramatic poet enabled him to turn some of his magnificent poetic expressions to the sonnets on and oft. But he confined the subject to two persons, that of the handsome young man and the Dark Lady and thereby unlocked his heart. It is evident in sonnet 144;

Bard in essence

*Greatest individual love poems in English

*Complicated and bizarre at some point

*No easy narrative

*Rapid shift of moods

*Absence of popularity

*Publisher’s dedication, not the poet’s

Going through his 154 sonnets that are spiced up with masteries which he has for reasons known only to him, are compacted with his passion, feelings, betrayals, disappointment and a relationship torn between a handsome man and a dark lady.

They describe the poet’s passionate affairs in a beautiful. Poignant and intriguing manner and very eloquently put across but at times. Misleading those who are not much acquainted with Shakespeare studies.

To us who us who live in Shakespeare’s world. We discover his feelings with much sympathy and understanding and his anguish especially over his passionate friendship with the Earl of Southapton.

Shakespeare’s frustration over his friend’s seduction with his mistress, his relationship with a rival poet and above all, the Bard’s humiliated infatuation with a coloured woman who still remains a mystery whom he describes with contempt; ‘The bay where all men ride’ implying her to be a harlot.

All these sonnet-incidents preceede The lover’s complaint and together considered a famous collection of love poems. He continues the same theme with much frustration some of which I have always believed, where so close to that of Omar Khayyam’s Ruba’Iyat.

‘A thousand favours from a maund she drew
Of, amber, crystal, and of beaded jet’ ....
(Stanza 6)
- A Lover’s Complaint

All attempts to identify the rival poet and the woman usually referred to as the Dark Lady have not borner fruitful results but we all guessed the handsome young man to be the Earl of Southapton.

Did they elude to Shakespeare’s own experiences? My guess is as good as yours; To the Bard, what mattered was the universal importance thrust upon the transience of beauty and of love, the power of friendship to transform the quality of love.

In Lover’s complaint, the fragility of love’s illusions, the humiliating aura on emotional and sexual subjection is the frailty with which the narrator sets the pastoral scene, then fades out. The maiden complains of her tale not to her lover but to an old man who happens to be grazing his cattle nearby. He listens in silence to her long complaint and against her hard heartedness.

So, the poem is both narrative and of double complaint as the girl is clearly forsaken. At this very instant, we find Shakespeare’s intimate communion with man and artist and in a moment of passion he interfuse a sense of artistry as he had done in Hamlet’s soliloquies.

And privileged by age, desires to know in Brief the grounds and motives of her woe’

In 1609 when Thomas Thorpe published Shakespeare’s sonnets in an edition, they were probably not authorised but an year later, a pirate volume of poems called The Passionate pilgrim appeared under Shakespeare’s name including some stray poems from his plays and intended as manuscript circulations.

But Thorpe published 155 poems, the last of them being the A Lover’s complaint which was not a sonnet but a poem of 44 stanzas.

Whether it should be seen in relations to the preceeding sonnets is, like so much else about this collection, a matter of doubt. Where the individual is strictly limited. The sequence seem capable of indefinite expansion, pilling on sonnet after sonnet and Shakespeare, ironically appear to say the same thing over and over again. Shakespeare’s sequence is not conventional when he says:

He was not playing the usual game. The normal, idealised mistress was white-skinned blond, red-lipped like Juliet, blessed with eyes that rivalled the sun. However, Shakespeare’s situation was not simple.

The web he spread, entangled him to such length, he was wading in a trap he found difficult to entangle himself. We find him weary of words, exhausted in searching the truth and weary after a journey:

Shakespeare trapped