William Shakespeare’s The Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint

The poem opens with a description of a young woman crying at the brink of a river throwing torn-up letters jewelry and other mementos of love into the water. An elderly gentleman approaches the woman and inquires about her sadness. She reacts by telling him about a previous lover who chased her seduced her and then abandoned her. She describes in detail how her lover enticed her with a speech. The 154 sonnets all but two of which are addressed to a beautiful young man Mr W.H. or a treacherous dark lady contain some of the most exquisite and haunting poetry ever written and deal with timeless subjects like love and infidelity memory and mortality and Times destruction.