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This only my review of A Lover's Complaint. If you're interested in my review for The Sonnets you can check it out here.

I don't know what to say. This didn't woe me at all. It wasn't memorable and the language and rhymes seemed super clumsy. I didn't plan on reading this in the first place, but my new copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets, had this narrative poem as an appendix, and so I thought I might as well...

The authorship of this poem has been the topic of the critical debate over the centuries. I have a feeling that no one wants to admit that the Bard himself wrote such trash, and so scholars say that it was only partly written by him... Okaaaaay, but I'm glad that we all agree: A Lover's Complaint is definitely of inferior quality. It's just shit.

The poem consists of forty-seven seven-line stanzas written in the rhyme royal (with the rhyme scheme ababbcc), a metre and structure identical to that of Shakespeare's poem The Rape of Lucrece. After a scene-setting introduction, the poem takes the form of a lengthy speech by an abandoned young woman, including a speech within her speech, as she recounts the words by which she was seduced.

The poem begins with the speaker describing seeing a young woman weeping at the edge of a river, into which she throws torn-up letters, rings, and other tokens of love. An old man nearby approaches the woman and asks the reason for her sorrow. She responds by telling him of a former lover who pursued, seduced, and finally abandoned her. She recounts in detail the speech her lover gave to her which seduced her. She concludes her story by conceding that she would fall for the young man's false charms again:

O that infected moisture of his eye,
O that false fire which in his cheek so glow'd,
O that forc'd thunder from his heart did fly,
O that sad breath his spongy lungs bestow'd,
O all that borrowed motion seemingly ow'd,
Would yet again betray the fore-betray'd,
And new pervert a reconciled maid!

So basically, what we learn from this poem is that we will never learn from our mistakes, and that when a ripped bonus man (who treated us like shit before) shows up at our porch, we'll let him fuck us over again. Great.