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 of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, there were few very successful traditional sonnets. "Modern Love" (1862) by George Meredith is a collection of fifty 16-line sonnets about the failure of his first marriage. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote several major sonnets, often in sprung rhythm, such as "The Windhover", and also several sonnet variants such as the 10-line curtal sonnet "Pied Beauty" and the 24-line caudate sonnet "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire". Hopkin's poetry was, however, not published until 1918. By the end of the 19th century, the sonnet had been adapted into a general-purpose form of great flexibility. In the United