The Fair Youth Sequence

The Fair Youth Sequence is sonnets 1-126 of Shakespeare's Sonnets.

"The Sonnets have consistently linked love to various material signifiers--the song of birds, the odor and hue of flowers, the distilled perfume of roses, the beauty of the Young Man's face, even the yellowed pages of the poet's verse in times to come. The end of the young man sequence, however, engages in a divestment from all such signifiers, as it rises above Time and its records (123), and all alone stands hugely politic. Eventually (126) it divest itself even of the young man in the two 'missing' lines of the envoy. There is literally no more to be said after the young man himself is 'rendered' by Nature to Time. The tables [in 122] may simply have been the first divestment, ending all materiality as a means of significance in order to pass to a nonmaterial and virtual realm (124)" (Vender, 519-520)