The Anacreontic Sequence

The Anacreontic Sequence is the last two sonnets of Shakespeare's Sonnets. These sonnets are based on an epigram by Marianus Scholasticus in which Cupid falls asleep, leaving his love-torch by his side, and some of the virgin Nymphs who attend Diana steal it hoping to cool it in a nearby well, but, in doing so, eternally heat said well. It is rendered thus by Emily Wilson:

Beneath these plane trees Love lay fast asleep;

his torch was given to the Nymphs to keep.

"Why wait?" they said, "Let's put out Cupid's brand,

and quench the fire that burns the heart of man."

But it inflamed the water, burnt the lot:

the baths the Nymphs of Love take now are hot.

"The original Greek love-story common to both poems: a nymph-votaress of Diana, vowed to chastity, quenches the sleeping Cupid's torch in a nearby fountain/well, which, taking on heat from the torch, becomes a curative bath for diseased men" (Vender, 648).

"The triviality of expression in these twinned poems has made them seem odd envoys to the second subsequence...yet the very triviality and ancientness of these little myths--and the comic and frivolous tone with which they treat the whole question of passion--cool down the 'deep oaths' of the rhetorically fevered lyric poems. The representative mythical I of 153 and 154 is far from the historical dramas personae who could urge the young man to get a son, or who could watch a woman playing the virginals. Comic distance is thereby gained on the realm of Eros and even on its enemy, Diana" (Vender, 649).