Sonnet 29 Sonnet 29 Sonnet 29 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is part of the Fair Youth sequence (which comprises sonnets 1-126 in the accepted numbering stemming from the first edition in 1609). In the sonnet, the speaker bemoans his status as an outcast and failure but feels better upon thinking of his beloved. Sonnet 29 is written in the typical Shakespearean sonnet form, having 14 lines of iambic pentameter ending in a rhymed couplet. Sonnet 29 follows the same basic structure as Shakespeare's other sonnets, containing fourteen lines and written in
Sonnet 59 as a "force, as it were, 'behind' the representative surface of the poetry." The physical is again seen as part of the psychology used by Shakespeare in the language of his sonnets. Much of the sonnet seems to be focused on a debate as to whether the old style or the new is superior. In fact, the opening lines stating that "If there be nothing new, but that which is Hath been before…" call to mind a similar passage from the Bible's Book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 1, verse 9: "The thing that hath been is that which shall be; and