> A guy in my class said that he's solidly straight, but if Shakespeare wrote that final couplet for him (and Shakespeare did, in fact, write his first 126 sonnets to a man, although it's unclear whether the relationship was actually nonplatonic) he'd "seriously consider switching teams." LOL. Personally, I think that this sonnet is intensely romantic. If someone recited this to me, I don't doubt I'd marry him/her on the spot. ;) I also really like the language. The first quatrain, for instance, feels at once very grand and very personal. (If that makes sense.) And, as with most of the sonnets that I most enjoy, I think that this one clearly and concisely captures a very human emotion that is also very elusive to writers -- the idea that just thinking about the beloved can lift your spirits out of deep depression into an elation and intense feeling of specialness.
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As a "lit geek" myself, I thought that I might say something about the addressee of Shakespeare's first 126 sonnets. I think that it is a bit disingenuous, or a bit too hasty in any case, to simply conclude that Shakespeare wrote these sonnets to a young man. The implication there is that the sonnets are autobiographical, and that the speaker in the sonnets and the young man addressed are real people, when in fact they may only be archetypes. There is a great deal of uncertainty about the sonnets, and, in fact, this uncertainty goes beyond the controversial details of the "young man" and "dark lady" to whether Shakespeare wrote the sonnets at all; the author may have been Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford.

So, despite the tendency for Shakespeare scholars to be definitive in their judgments and declarations, we simply know too little about Shakespeare's life to say much at all about the relationship between Shakespeare and his sonnets (assuming he wrote them), let alone make definitive statments regarding any biographical information that might be gleaned from them. I think it is particularly important to be careful in this area, considering that many of those who advocate most strongly for a strong biographical connection between Shakespeare and the speaker in the sonnets do so with an ideological agenda, that is, an attempt to characterize Shakespeare as homosexual or bisexual.

I simply think that the issue is much more murky than many scholars let on. Fortunately, one need not understand or even care about Shakespeare's sexuality to appreciate his writing. I love the choice of poetry you have here; sonnet 130 in particular is a masterwork. It is simply wonderful.