Seven Ages

Poem · c. 1601

Shakespeare’s Phoenix and the Turtle

Sixty-seven lines of philosophical elegy, published in 1601: a funeral for the phoenix and the turtledove, who loved so completely that two became one and logic itself gives up trying to count them.

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By the Seven Ages editors2 min read

Nobody fully agrees on what it means; nearly everyone agrees it is extraordinary.

This is Shakespeare at his most abstract and most modern-seeming — closer to metaphysical poetry than anything else he wrote. The shortest work in the canon and the strangest; read it twice in a sitting.

Phoenix and the Turtle on screen

A curated guide to The Phoenix and the Turtle on film and television is in the works.

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Mark it in your record when you finish — one seat, kept for decades.

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