²⁴ The uniqueness of what Shakespeare attempts here helps explain C. Burrow’s conclusion: ‘Shakespeare’s poem is clearly pushing in the direction of an innovative and abstract poetic vocabulary. … His poem feels as though it is coming from another world, and as though it grows from thinking, and thinking gravely, about sacrifice in love, and about where Elizabethan poetry might move next. But the difficulty of attaching his poem to particular circumstances may partly derive from the work which it is attempting to achieve: to keep the name of Shakespeare alive and to keep it associated with new forms’ (Complete Sonnets and Poems, 89–90). For support, see Everett, ‘Set upon A Golden Bough’, 13–14; and Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (London: Allen Lane-Penguin, 2000), ix, 69–71.