Sonnet 49 Sonnet 49 Sonnet 49 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man. Sonnet 49 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet. The English sonnet contains three quatrains followed by a final rhyming couplet, for a total of fourteen lines. It follows the form's typical rhyme scheme, "abab cdcd efef gg" and is written in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions. Line thirteen exemplifies a regular
Sonnet 2 child and thereby protect himself from reproach by preserving his beauty against Time's destruction. Sonnet 2 begins with a military siege metaphor, something that occurs often in sonnets and poetry — from Virgil (‘he ploughs the brow with furrows’) and Ovid (‘furrows which may plough your body will come already’) to Shakespeare’s contemporary, Drayton, “The time-plow’d furrows in thy fairest field.” The image is used here as a metaphor for a wrinkled brow. Trenches are also carved into a field when a farmer plows, and the agricultural connotation is touched on two lines later with the image of worthless weeds.