Sonnet 23 and then his collection of poems to a play. Sonnet 23 is considered an English or Shakespearean Sonnet. It contains 14 iambic pentameter lines. The rhyme scheme is "abab cdcd efef gg". The form consists of three quatrains and a couplet. All of the lines, including the fifth line are examples of iambic pentameter: After the octave (the first two quatrains) there is often a change referred to as a volta. In Sonnet 23 the volta is line nine's suggestion. "For fear of trust" has drawn different, though not necessarily contradictory, glosses. Nicolaus Delius has it "from want of self-confidence,"
Sonnet 60 claims that the first two lines are "answered directly by two regular lines". Despite this disagreement, both critics acknowledge that the non-iambic feet simulate the undulating and crashing waves that Shakespeare portrays in the first line of the sonnet. While Vendler emphasizes the meter of the first quatrain, Atkins and Arbour continue this analysis by examining the second quatrain. After the first quatrain, the next trochee occurs in the middle of line 5, the only medial trochee of the sonnet, followed by trochees at the beginning of the sixth and seventh lines. The sixth and seventh lines mirror the first