Sonnet 20 Sonnet 20 Sonnet 20 is one of the best-known of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. Part of the Fair Youth sequence (which comprises sonnets 1-126), the subject of the sonnet is widely interpreted as being male, thereby raising questions about the sexuality of its author. In this sonnet (as in, for example, Sonnet 53) the beloved's beauty is compared to both a man's and a woman's. Sonnet 20 is a typical English or Shakespearean sonnet, containing three quatrains and a couplet for a total of fourteen lines. It follows the rhyme scheme of this
Sonnet 42 rhymes at the end of the lines: especially in the second quatrain as a poetic device, similar to sonnet 40. "The poem is essentially a sad one…it's sadness heightened by the feminine endings, six in all [out of seven]". Many critics seem to agree with this reading of the feminine endings, and note that additionally, the author uses two words to imply the emotionality tied up in his sonnet. The word "loss" is repeated throughout this poem, appearing six times. The repetition of this word emphasizes how strongly the speaker feels that he has been deprived of the two most