Shakespheare considered his poems works of art and his plays merely entertainment, as I remember from some source in the past. So taking them seriously as works of art, I will say that they aren't bad, although the word order is jumbled up to get the rhymes right , I would suppose. This often makes it hard to read the poem aloud and have it roll off the tongue. I've been trying to used to the Elizabethan English for quite some time now, but still I am little uncomfortable with it. He has the awkwardness of John Dunne, in my opinion.
I will have to say that the poet is a bit queer with all this talk of the beauty of this youthful man he so passionately loves. I suppose a queer theorist would have a field day with what I would consider his neurotic obsession. Nonetheless, the poems have some pathos about the passing of time and how it will destroy the beauty of this young man. The poet seems to be like an old queer admiring the beauty of a young man that he cannot keep faithful to him. He encourages the youth to have children in the first few poems so that he will make a beautiful copy of himself for posterity to enjoy, and so he will not go to the grave wizened by time. The first few poems are a highpoint along with the poems in the in the sixties which have ruminations again about aging, death, and decay, and the destroying of youth by these three, which is one of poets' best themes-- we don't want any cheery, frivolous escapist poetry, but poems that expresses our rather sad, pathetic, little lives where even the best and most favored are eventually devoured by death and decay. Escapism is the realm of entertainment, facing harsh reality head-on is the realm of great art.
But is the poet really homosexual, or bi-sexual, or straight, or does it matter? Perhaps he has a higher aristocratic love that we cannot understand. In the latter poems, a woman becomes the object of discussion, but this woman is sometimes false to the poet and he doesn't seem to have the same enthusiasm for her as the young man.
Spark Notes has come out with a series of No Fear Shakespheare works translated into modern English and I liked the translation very much. The translator was able to convey the subtleties of the poems such as gentle wit and forlorn gloominess in a poetic fashion, but the translation is not done in poetry. I would have liked to have a brief critical summary of the themes of the poems and who they may have been written about. I hope they end up translating all the plays, not just the popular ones, so my Skakespheare project won't stall when I have to read them solely in the Elizabethan English. Afterall, Shakespheare deserves such attention, right? He's supposedly the best, but I`m impudent and skeptical.