Sonnet 86 is one of 154 sonnets first published by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare in the Quarto of 1609. It is the final poem of the Rival Poet group of the Fair Youth sonnets in which Shakespeare writes about an unnamed young man and a rival poet competing for the youth's favor. The exact date of its composition is unknown, it has been suggested that the Rival Poet series may have been written between 1598 and 1600. Sonnet 86 has attracted attention because it seems to offer clues to the identity of the Rival Poet. Exegesis Sonnet 86 is one last attempt by the poet to explain why he has been struck silent, and how words seem useless when silence is the only decent expression. The sonnet describes in backwards motion the progress of his own anguish: In the first quatrain the poet in him is entombed, as the attempt and failure of the poet's writing process is described with a metaphor of a pregnancy and miscarriage (line 3). In the second quatrain the poet is struck dead, in the third he becomes sick. Running alongside of this, but in forward motion, there is a progressive derogation of the rival poet, a progress that starts high with the magnificent nautical metaphor of line one. The sonnet's imagery of sea going vessels ("proud full sail") recalls the mighty galleons of the Spanish Armada that fought the British fleet of smaller, more nimble ships. The image of a galleon at full sail sailing in the direction of some treasure, invites admiration for the strength of the rival's poetry, and for the size of his ambition. This image is diminished in the second quatrain, when it is suggested that the rival is merely co-author along with his "compeers", and it is diminished further in the third quatrain when the rival is shown to be duped ("which nightly gulls him") by those "spirits". The sonnet begins with the speaker asking whether it was the "great verse" of his rival poet that had prevented the speaker from expressing his own "ripe thoughts." According to Duncan-Jones, "As in the final line of the preceding sonnet, the speaker claims to be unable to voice his thoughts of love: they are ready for utterance (ripe), but remain buried (in-hearsed) in his brain because [the speaker's question proposes] he is intimidated by his rival." Harold Bloom