"So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee" When this collection of Shakespeare's poems first appeared in 1609, he had already written most of the great plays that made him famous. The 154 sonnets - all but two of which are addressed to a beautiful young man or a treacherous dark lady - contain some of the most exquisite and haunting poetry ever written,and deal with such eternal subjects as love and infidelity, memory and mortality, and the destruction wreaked by time. Appended to the sonnets is a longer poem A Lover's Complaint, in which a young woman is overheard lamenting her betrayal by a heartless seducer.