Sonnet 18 this sonnet: it is not the actual young man who will be eternalized, but the description of him contained in the poem, and the poem contains scant or no description of the young man, but instead contains vivid and lasting descriptions of a summer day; which the young man is supposed to outlive. Sonnet 18 is a typical English or Shakespearean sonnet, having 14 lines of iambic pentameter: three quatrains followed by a couplet. It also has the characteristic rhyme scheme: "abab cdcd efef gg". The poem reflects the rhetorical tradition of an Italian or Petrarchan Sonnet. Petrarchan sonnets typically
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