Elizabethan readers read poems both with their eyes and with their ears, and this is the reason behind the fortune of shaped poems and emblems at the time.
Shakespeare was interested in the competition between verbal and visual modalities, rather than in their collaboration. The images used in the Sonnets are illuminating only if the possibility to ‘imagine them’ is perceived. It is from this capacity to imagine and the capacity of poetry to picture the mind, that Shakespeare’s Sonnets re-elaborate the attempt of the hypostasis between word and image.
The Sonnets (especially the first ones) abound of conventional images, which are almost emblems.
The essay discusses in particular the images of the rose and that of the monument, both featured in the Sonnets. In the compositions, the text becomes a real image. In this progression, the reader can follow the passages from the illustrated poem, to the poem added to the image (emblem), to the poem on the image and finally to the poem as image; to the text as symbol of the written, verbal, and aural invention of the Poet.
