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
Curtal sonnet Curtal sonnet The curtal sonnet is a form invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and used in three of his poems. It is an eleven-line (or, more accurately, ten-and-a-half-line) sonnet, but rather than the first eleven lines of a standard sonnet it consists of precisely ¾ of the structure of a Petrarchan sonnet shrunk proportionally. The octave of a sonnet becomes a sestet and the sestet a quatrain plus an additional "tail piece." That is, the first eight lines of a sonnet are translated into the first six lines of a curtal sonnet and the last six lines of a sonnet