Shakespeare's sonnets

In addition to all those famous plays, William Shakespeare also wrote poetry, including 154 sonnets.

A sonnet is a poem consisting of 14 lines, each with ten syllables. The Elizabethan rhyme scheme followed by Shakespeare is
a b a b c d c d e f e f g g.

The sonnets of Shakespeare were printed in 1609 and probably date from the 1590s. ... Most of them trace the course of the writer's affection for a young man of rank and beauty: the first 17 urge him to marry to reproduce his beauty ...
Other characters are alluded to in the sequence, including a mistress stolen by a friend (40-2), a rival poet (78-80 and 80-6), and a dark beauty loved by the author (127-52). Numerous identifications for all the 'characters' involved in the sequence ... have been put forward: none of them is certain.
(source: The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 5th edition, ed. Margaret Drabble, 1985)

appears in:

• "My Bird Performs" (on Nonsuch)

further reading:

• Shakespeare's sonnets (part of an online The Complete Works of William Shakespeare) -- here's your chance to read them to see if they leave you cold.
• the Shakespeare web, self-described as being "an interactive, hypermedia environment dedicated to the increasingly popular understanding and enjoyment of Shakespeare's plays and other works."