The first seventeen sonnets, for example, seem to be addressed to a young man, urging him to marry and have children “Sonnet 18” marks a change in theme from that of immortality by means of procreation, to immortality through verse.
Many Shakespearean critics, however, have recognized patterns or groups within the sequence. When Thomas Thorpe published Shakespeare’s sequence of 154 sonnets in 1609, he did not organize the poems into divisions.
