Sonnet_50

Sonnet 50

Sonnet 50

Poem by William Shakespeare


Sonnet 50 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. It is continued in Sonnet 51.

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Structure

Sonnet 50 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet, containing 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, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions per line. The first line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:

 ×   /  ×  / ×  /   ×  /    ×  / 
How heavy do I journey on the way, (50.1)
/ = ictus, a metrically strong syllabic position. × = nonictus.

The meter demands some variant pronunciations of words. In line seven, the second syllable is stressed in "instínct".[2] In line five "tired" is two syllables, and in line eight "being" is one.

Interpretations


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 234.

Further reading

First edition and facsimile
Variorum editions
Modern critical editions

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