PREFACE

Summary

I began this edition of the finest love poetry in the world in what I think must be the loveliest garden on earth. It lies in a level upland glade shut in by dark forests stretching up to jagged mountain tops, but itself containing a luxuriant orchard and stately trees dotted about it here and there, while it fearlessly exposes its grassy slopes to the midsummer heat of the southern hemisphere, being watered and cooled by running streams and deep dark pools that give teeming life to birds and flowers of many kinds and colours, while to crown all extend the sweeping curves of a stately house, dwelling-place of a great lady. Shakespeare, I fancy, had imagined just such a home of peace and delight as his Belmont. Or he may even have seen one not unlike it at Wilton. Certainly it was a happy fortune that placed me amid such surroundings when I had to set hand to my last volume in the New Cambridge Shakespeare, begun forty years ago. For all the plays in the canon being now published, the Poems and the Sonnets remained, the former for Professor Maxwell, the latter for myself, and I was here in South Africa sitting one morning early in 1962 under the shade of a deodar tree, with a copy of the Sonnets in my hand to begin what after four years would become the volume the reader has before him.