Sonnet_48

Sonnet 48

Sonnet 48

Poem by William Shakespeare


Sonnet 48 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.

Quick Facts «» ...

Structure

Sonnet 48 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet, a type of sonnet that contains three quatrains followed by a final rhyming couplet. It follows the form's typical rhyme scheme, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, and is written in iambic pentameter based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions per line. The second line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:

×      / ×  /  ×    /×    /    ×    / 
Each trifle under truest bars to thrust, (48.2)
/ = ictus, a metrically strong syllabic position. × = nonictus.

Notes

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

Further reading

First edition and facsimile
Variorum editions
Modern critical editions

Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Sonnet_48, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.