With his curiously cryptic Sonnet 114, William Shakespeare poses a rhetorical question to his younger lover, asking whether his experience of seeing him in everything he looks at is down simply to his eye flattering him, or to his eye having acquired the ancient mystical art of alchemy and actually turning even ugly creatures into beautiful angelic beings just such as the young man himself.

He then also settles the matter emphatically and declares without reservation that it is indeed flattery on the eye's part that has this effect on him, but that any sin the mind may be committing in lapping it all up is mitigated by the fact that the eye too loves what it wants to see – the young man's beauty – and so willingly tastes of this flattering, though therefore potentially poisonous, potion first, before passing it on for the mind to metaphorically imbibe.

With Sonnet 113, William Shakespeare returns once more to the theme of separation, reflecting on how, when he is away from his younger lover, everything he sees takes on his lover's shape and thus reminds him of him.

Although we don't know when exactly the sonnet was written and therefore where precisely in the collection it belongs, it would appear to also, therefore, pick up on the notion, emphatically expressed in the previous sonnet, of his lover being his 'all the world', and it certainly also connects strongly to the sonnet that follows, which will further elaborate on the idea that the younger man with his beauty turns even the ugliest appearance to loveliness in Shakespeare's mind.

With Sonnet 112, William Shakespeare picks up directly from Sonnet 111 in which he asked his younger lover to pity him, and he now goes one step further by telling him that it is his, the young man's, opinion – and his opinion only – that should ever matter to Shakespeare, because not only is the young man, as Sonnets 109 and 110 expressed, his "home of love" and "a god in love" to whom he considers himself "confined" and therefore fully committed, the young man is, so Shakespeare now asserts, his everything, his "all the world," and thus quite simply the only one who matters to him.

Beyond that though, the sonnet also may well be telling us a great deal about the young lover's position towards Shakespeare and therefore about the status and character of their relationship at this advanced point in the proceedings, as we shall see...