With his curiously cryptic Sonnet 114, William Shakespeare poses a rhetorical question to his younger lover, asking whether his experience of seeing him in everything he looks at is down simply to his eye flattering him, or to his eye having acquired the ancient mystical art of alchemy and actually turning even ugly creatures into beautiful angelic beings just such as the young man himself.

He then also settles the matter emphatically and declares without reservation that it is indeed flattery on the eye's part that has this effect on him, but that any sin the mind may be committing in lapping it all up is mitigated by the fact that the eye too loves what it wants to see – the young man's beauty – and so willingly tastes of this flattering, though therefore potentially poisonous, potion first, before passing it on for the mind to metaphorically imbibe.

With Sonnet 113, William Shakespeare returns once more to the theme of separation, reflecting on how, when he is away from his younger lover, everything he sees takes on his lover's shape and thus reminds him of him.

Although we don't know when exactly the sonnet was written and therefore where precisely in the collection it belongs, it would appear to also, therefore, pick up on the notion, emphatically expressed in the previous sonnet, of his lover being his 'all the world', and it certainly also connects strongly to the sonnet that follows, which will further elaborate on the idea that the younger man with his beauty turns even the ugliest appearance to loveliness in Shakespeare's mind.

With Sonnet 112, William Shakespeare picks up directly from Sonnet 111 in which he asked his younger lover to pity him, and he now goes one step further by telling him that it is his, the young man's, opinion – and his opinion only – that should ever matter to Shakespeare, because not only is the young man, as Sonnets 109 and 110 expressed, his "home of love" and "a god in love" to whom he considers himself "confined" and therefore fully committed, the young man is, so Shakespeare now asserts, his everything, his "all the world," and thus quite simply the only one who matters to him.

Beyond that though, the sonnet also may well be telling us a great deal about the young lover's position towards Shakespeare and therefore about the status and character of their relationship at this advanced point in the proceedings, as we shall see...

With Sonnet 111, William Shakespeare shifts focus from his infidelities in relation to his younger lover, addressed in the previous two sonnets, to a general deficiency in his reputation, which he blames squarely on the fact that his circumstances require him to earn a living in the public sphere.

This, he claims, has led him to acquire the conduct of a person who attracts opprobrium, and while proposing to subject himself to whatever 'medicine' or 'penance' may be required of him, he sees and seeks his remedy first and foremost in the younger man's pity. This, he assures him, will suffice to cure him of any ills he may suffer resulting from any such misdeeds as come with the lifestyle his fortunes have imposed on him.

With his exceptionally candid and forthright Sonnet 110, William Shakespeare at once completes his apotheosis of his young lover, while at the same time confessing to him that yes, he too has had affairs with other people, but also reassuring him that these other lovers were no match for him and that they pale, compared to him, into insignificance, seeing that he is as "a god in love" to whom our poet feels and here declares himself to be inseparably tied.

Sonnet 109 is the first of two truly remarkable sonnets that speak of William Shakespeare's own infidelities towards his young lover during a period of prolonged absence.

Although they do not form a strictly tied pair, together these two poems position our poet and his relationship in an entirely new light, because they for the first time genuinely acknowledge that he, too, like his young lover, has succumbed to temptation elsewhere while they were apart, but they both affirm him to be the only one who ever mattered and the one who truly matters now.

With Sonnet 108, William Shakespeare loops back into sentiments expressed intermittently since Sonnet 76, but particularly again recently in Sonnet 105: I have essentially said it all, there is nothing I can do other than repeat and reiterate and rephrase the praises I have sung and continue to sing for you. What it also picks up from Sonnet 105 is the religious tone this set with a there still fairly oblique reference to the Holy Trinity. This was already amplified, though subtly, in Sonnet 106, and here finds a whole new level of what may potentially be perceived as impudence, if looked on from a devoutly religious perspective.
What it also does – and this may in some respects for our observation be most directly relevant – is to tell his young lover yet again that he is showing signs of age, but that to him, Shakespeare, this doesn't matter.

Of all the poems in the collection first published in 1609, Sonnet 107 most clearly and most compellingly seems to refer to external events that shape Shakespeare's world.

Because of this, it takes up a pivotal position in the canon, since it may therein hold clues to both its date of composition and to the person it is addressed to. And while there is little doubt in most people's mind that its references are indeed intentional and allude to some momentous occasion that has passed off signally better than anyone at the time would have predicted, and that in the ensuing calm and peace our poet feels that his love and his poetry have been given a new lease of life, no-one can tell with absolute certainty just what Shakespeare is actually referring to or whom he is talking to, or even whether the two factors are directly or only indirectly linked, or not at all.

There are, however, significant clues, and so much of our discussion of this sonnet will concern itself with what these are and what they mean for our reading of this and the other sonnets in the series.