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 144 Sonnet 144 Sonnet 144 (along with Sonnet 138) was published in the "Passionate Pilgrim" (1599). Shortly before this, Francis Meres referred to Shakespeare's Sonnets in his handbook of Elizabethan poetry, "Palladis Tamia, or Wit's Treasurie", published in 1598, which was frequently talked about in the literary centers of London taverns. Shakespeare's sonnets are mostly addressed to a young man, but the chief subject of Sonnet 127 through Sonnet 152 is the "dark lady". Several sonnets portray a conflicted relationship between the speaker, the "dark lady" and the young man. Sonnet 144 is one of the most prominent sonnets to address