Thus far the capacity of Shakespeare’s language to explore the structures of thought by rhetorical means has been seen as a dramatic phenomenon. Naturally so: the meeting of a challenge (somehow to represent what is going on in the mind) and an opportunity (a burgeoning range of theatrical speech styles) leads to speeches that are not simply speaking. Broader questions remain, of which one – whether this is a specifically dramatic phenomenon – will be tackled in this brief chapter on the Sonnets. The emphatic embodiment of action, words, and thoughts is of course implicit in the cognitive-heuristic content of plays. Nevertheless, it still proves possible for a poem – perhaps a poem engaged in a particular mimetic challenge, and especially a lyric charged with articulating an intense emotion – to resemble something like thinking in a cognitive rhetoric. Shakespeare’s Sonnets are in fact an ideal place to pursue this possibility. They are frequently driven by metaphors (expanded into conceits), they face repeating cognitive crises (how to handle the young man and the dark lady and the emotional turmoil they cause), and they are vividly voiced by a speaker who often takes a strong position – at times a dramatic position. As in earlier chapters there will be a tension between an attempt to appreciate the whole poem, to capture (without simply summarising) concerted effects, while also attending to local perturbations. Here too there is a need to acknowledge that it will be necessary sometimes to quibble about the coherence of a metaphor or simile while implicitly or explicitly acknowledging that it may be marvellously effectual even without matching its parts.