SOURCE: “Set Upon a Golden Bough to Sing: Shakespeare's Debt to Sidney in The Phoenix and Turtle,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 5107, February 16, 2001, pp. 13-15.

In the following essay, Everett examines the meter and rhyme of The Phoenix and Turtle, and finds that “Shakespeare writes nowhere else—not even in his last plays—quite like this.”

Shakespeare wrote rather few poems. If we think of the Sonnets as a sequence rather than an amassment (and many scholars do, though there are arguments against it), then the number of short poems dwindles pointedly. Among them, “The Phoenix and Turtle” stands out, and even has a claim to be called Shakespeare's best poem. And yet it is little known. Its admirers are agreed above all on the poem's problems, its quality of the cryptic and enigmatic.

That this remarkable love poem should be little read, and when read found odd...