Sonnet 102
Sonnet 102 is one of the 154 sonnets written by English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is one of the Fair Youth sonnets, in which Shakespeare writes of an unnamed youth with whom the poet is enamored. Sonnet 102 is among a series of seemingly connected sonnets, from Sonnet 100 to Sonnet 103, in which the poet speaks of a silence between his Muse and himself. The exact date of writing is unknown, and there is contention among scholars about when they were written. Paul Hammond among other scholars believes that sonnets 61-103 were written primarily during the early 1590s, and then being edited or added to later, during the early 1600s (decade). Regardless of date of writing, it was published later along with the rest of the sonnets of the 1609 Quarto.
Sonnet 1
Sonnet 1 is the first in a series of 154 sonnets written by William Shakespeare and published in 1609 by Thomas Thorpe. Nineteenth-century critics thought Thorpe might have published the poems without Shakespeare's consent, but modern scholars don't agree and consider that Thorpe maintained a good reputation. Sonnet 1 is the first of the "Fair Youth" sonnets, in which an unnamed young man is being addressed by the speaker. Patrick Cheney comments on this: "Beginning with a putatively male speaker imploring a beautiful young man to reproduce, and concluding with a series of poems – the dark lady poems – that affiliate consummated heterosexual passion with incurable disease, Shakespeare's Sonnets radically and deliberately disrupt the conventional narrative of erotic courtship". Sonnet 1 serves as being a kind of introduction to the rest of the sonnets, and may have been written later than the ones that follow. The "procreation sonnets" (sonnets 1 – 17) urge this youth to not waste his beauty by failing to marry or reproduce. Joseph Pequigney notes: "... the opening movement give[s the] expression to one compelling case... The first mode of preservation entertained is procreation, which is urged without letup in the first fourteen poems and twice again".