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 151 steer his actions. It uses the body as a metaphor for the penis, "rising" and "falling" with an erection when aroused, and so reduces the speaker to nothing more than his phallus; by giving in to his desires he enslaves himself to the "Dark Lady". Sonnet 151, with a "bawdy chronicle of erection and detumescence," contrasts with Sonnet 55's "grandiloquent expression," but their theme is the same: "what changes, what remains." Sonnet 55 "celebrates ... love and poetry that endure[s]" where Sonnet 151 "contemplates the inevitability of change..." Sonnet 151 has been compared to a verse by 17th-century author Joseph