Sonnet 28 phrase in Sonnet 28 "to please him" refers to one of the torturers, but for a moment the reader has had planted in his thoughts an image of the fair youth as a flattery-craving tyrant. Sonnet 28 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet. It consists of 14 lines arranged by the rhyme scheme to form three quatrains (lines 1–12) and a couplet (lines 13–14). The rhyme scheme is: abab cdcd efef gg. It is written in iambic pentameter, a metre based on five feet in each line, with each foot containing two syllables accented weak/strong: The two lines of the
Sonnet 151 steer his actions. It uses the body as a metaphor for the penis, "rising" and "falling" with an erection when aroused, and so reduces the speaker to nothing more than his phallus; by giving in to his desires he enslaves himself to the "Dark Lady". Sonnet 151, with a "bawdy chronicle of erection and detumescence," contrasts with Sonnet 55's "grandiloquent expression," but their theme is the same: "what changes, what remains." Sonnet 55 "celebrates ... love and poetry that endure[s]" where Sonnet 151 "contemplates the inevitability of change..." Sonnet 151 has been compared to a verse by 17th-century author Joseph