Sonnet 154 presented in Sonnet 153. In the first quatrain, the man wishes that his beauty be passed onto his heir. The second quatrain asks the question of how beauty can be maintained through time and poetry. Finally, the third ends with the woeful realization that the preservation of happiness is problematic in and of itself. The rhyme scheme within Sonnet 153 and 154 is inconsistent in that the words do not necessarily follow the same sounds. Lines 10 and 12 end with the words "perpetual" and "thrall" and lines 13 and 14 end with "prove" and "love." Authors argue that this
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