This collection of thirty-four sonnets from eight poets across five centuries centers around Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. In addition to twenty-one selections from that sequence, it includes three sonnets from Edmund Spenser's Amoretti, five from William Shakespeare, and one each from John Milton, Emma Lazarus, Sara Teasdale, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. A sonnet from the compiler, referencing Sonnets from the Portuguese, ends the collection. Classic romantic themes are explored such as the worth of the beloved and the unworthiness of the lover, the enduring nature of love and doubt of "the thing called love", and the life-giving joy of love and the chilling pain of its absence.