Sonnet 49 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.

Structure

Sonnet 49 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet. The English sonnet contains three quatrains followed by a final rhyming couplet, for a total of fourteen lines. It follows the form's typical rhyme scheme, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, and is written in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions. Line thirteen exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:

 ×  /     ×    /   ×   /     ×    /     ×   / 
To leave poor me thou hast the strength of laws, (49.13)
/ = ictus, a metrically strong syllabic position. × = nonictus.

Line ten's "desert" would have been for Shakespeare a full rhyme with "part", as is suggested by the Quarto's spelling, "desart".[2]

Notes

  1. ^ Pooler, C[harles] Knox, ed. (1918). The Works of Shakespeare: Sonnets. The Arden Shakespeare [1st series]. London: Methuen & Company. OCLC 4770201.
  2. ^ Kerrigan 1995, p 233.

Further reading

First edition and facsimile
Variorum editions
Modern critical editions
No tags for this post.