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 26 composed in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions per line. The seventh line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter line. The next contains a final extrametrical syllable or "feminine ending", of which this sonnet has six; it also exhibits an ictus moved to the right (resulting in a four-position figure, codice_1, sometimes referred to as a "minor ionic"): As Stephen Booth notes, Sonnet 26 works on a series of "shows": the word appears in four separate lines of the sonnet. Booth perceives a vague sexual pun in the second half of