Sonnet 49 iambic pentameter: Line ten's "desert" would have been for Shakespeare a full rhyme with "part", as is suggested by the Quarto's spelling, "desart". 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
Sonnet 71 him to mourn. This is particularly ironic considering that there are lines in other sonnets (e.g., Sonnet 18, Sonnet 55, Sonnet 65 and Sonnet 81) that speak of immortality through poetic verse, thus negating the possibility that one can be forgotten. These examples give credence to Peguiney's argument of a calculated attempt to invoke the youth's mourning, as he writes in his essay Sonnets 71-74, "The 'if' clauses at lines 5 and 9 are cunning invitations to future readings of the verse, and how impossible it would be for 'you [to] read this [handwritten] line' and 'remember not / The