‘Desire is death’, wrote Shakespeare, exploiting a commonplace of the sixteenth century love-lyric, which lies also at the crux of the anonymous sixteenth century Cypriot sonnets, published with an extensive scholarly introduction, French translation and notes, in 1952, by Thémis Siapkaras-Pitsillidès. The collection comprises one hundred and fifty-six poems, in a variety of metrical forms, some of which translate or adapt Italian originals. Thémis Siapkaras-Pitsillidès addresses the following questions: manuscript condition and origins; dating; authorship; influences, and versification. The poems are placed in categories according to metrical form, and a description of metre and rhyme-schemes is provided. More recently, Lucia Marcheselli-Loukas has made a detailed formal study arguing that the Cypriot sonnets show considerable originality of versification and made a significant contribution to the formation of the Modern Greek literary Koine. In this paper, we shall examine the themes and structures of one of the best-represented metrical forms in the collection: the sonnet.