Sonnet 24 Sonnet 24 Sonnet 24 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare, and is a part of the Fair Youth sequence. In the sonnet, Shakespeare treats the commonplace Renaissance conceit connecting heart and eye. Although it relates to other sonnets that explore this theme, Sonnet 24 is considered largely imitative and conventional. Sonnet 24 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet. English sonnets contain fourteen lines, including three quatrains and a final couplet. It follows the typical rhyme scheme of the form: "abab cdcd efef gg", and is written in iambic pentameter, a type of
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