Sonnet 124 Wright suggests in his book "The Structure of Shakespeare's Sonnets" that in the first four lines of Sonnet 124 the speaker puts forth a hypothetical; if the speakers' love were the product of circumstance, then it would have no strong foundations and would be "Fortune's bastard". Being "unfather'd" the love would then be subject to "Time's love or to Times' hate". The next set of lines then alludes to the personification of Time found in Sonnet 123, in which Time has a scythe (Sonnet 123. 14). In Sonnet 124, the scythe used by Time subjects its victims to either "Times
Sonnet 20 syllable to the traditional form may also represent a phallus. Sonnet 20 is one of only two in the sequence with feminine endings to its lines; the other is Sonnet 87. Stackhouse also comments on the reveal of the gender of the addressee in the final few lines as a way of Shakespeare playing with the idea of gender throughout the poem. Stackhouse's analysis of the nature aspect also seemed to play into the "gender-bending" model by creating this idea of Mother Nature falling in love with her creation and thus imparting a phallus to him. Which is represented in