The teaching of Shakespeare’s sonnet 34, among others, was attempted in order to counterbalance an overabundance of "survey" courses and to take the students deeply into a single major writer a poet again to counterbalance an overabundance of courses on prose writers. Sonnet 34 provided a few challenges in several archaic words, and in some Christian terms, but dealing with these left the students in a good position to successfully ingest and enjoy this and other sonnets.