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 88 This is especially clear in the context of other sonnets in the sequence that deal with a division between the poet and the young man. The poet does reserve for himself the story-telling posture ("I can set down a story"), which includes the considerable powers of poetry, powers that have been a recurring theme in the sonnets. Sonnet 88 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet, which has three quatrains, followed by a final rhyming couplet. It follows the rhyme scheme, "abab cdcd efef gg" and is composed in iambic pentameter lines, which is a poetic metre in which each line