This sequence of sonnets was written for Margaret who is known as the Lady, or Lublu pictured on the book's cover. She spent part of her early life in the theatre and I was impressed with the well-read Complete Works of Shakespeare she had at her side.
It was the sonnets she dipped into and within a year of our meeting I vowed to write one more to her than Shakespeare wrote to his love(s). Such bravado was on the basis of my having written two poems to the Lady, one a parody vaguely Shakespearean.
They were immediately more satisfying to compose than letters, or than presenting the Lady with endless tokens of love and affection. She responded to each new poem with kindness and as they got better, ironically, with silence. Always they moved her, sometimes to tears.
They were undoubtedly a great help as she fell ill. By the time the illness was diagnosed as terminal the Complete Works had been discretely put away. At the Lady's bedside now was a lizard skin folder and the cards in which I had presented a poem as often as I could. It is sadness itself that sadness creeps into the sequence from about Sonnet XXVI. I had written 51 of my target of 155 at the time of her death in 2003 (the "Tragedie.")
The sonnets are in the Elizabethan form of fourteen lines, three quatrains and a couplet summarising the poem. The rhyming is abab, cdcd, efef, gg. Apart from those that are a formal declaration of love there is a lighter secondary theme featuring Margaret's childhood toys. In these she is Lublu. Her suitor is flute-playing Pierrot and they are joined by a host of characters that lived in the twilight world of her house, King's Court.