Read The Sonnets by email.
The whole sequence, one poem at a time.
One hundred fifty-four sonnets, first published in 1609 — meditations on beauty, time, love, and the strange immortality of verse. One a day, as they were meant to be savored.
Under a minute a day, and each installment stands alone.
Five months from now, you will have read Shakespeare.
154 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1609
- Installments
- 154
- Each installment
- under a minute
How long it takes
- Words
- 17,517
- Reading time
- 1 hour 13 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 2 weeks
- At 10 minutes a day
- 7 days
- At 20 minutes a day
- 4 days
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read The Sonnets?
The Sonnets are the most famous sequence of poems in English, and almost nobody reads them the way they work best: slowly. Read as a book, 154 sonnets blur together in an afternoon. Read one a day, each fourteen-line argument gets the space it was built for — a single idea turned over, complicated, and landed in a couplet.
This is the ideal first serial: the daily commitment is about a minute, there is no plot to lose track of, and by the end you will have read every sonnet Shakespeare published — something few English majors can claim.
Our edition preserves the verse as verse. Every line break, every indented couplet, exactly as it should sit on the page — not the prose blob some email services make of poetry.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read Shakespeare's Sonnets?
Read straight through, the 154 sonnets take under two hours — but they aren't built for that. By email, one sonnet a day takes about a minute each morning and finishes in five months, which is closer to how the sequence rewards attention.
Are the Sonnets hard to read?
Individual lines can be knotty, but each poem is only fourteen lines — the shortest possible dose of Shakespeare. If a sonnet doesn't land, tomorrow brings another. It's the lowest-stakes way into Elizabethan English there is.
Do I need to read them in order?
They arrive in the traditional 1609 order, which loosely traces the story readers have argued about for four centuries — the young man, the rival poet, the dark lady. You'll notice the arcs without any study apparatus.
How does it arrive?
One email a day at the hour you pick — morning, lunch, or evening. Free. Unsubscribe or pause from any installment.
Project Gutenberg text (#1041), public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.