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 20 syllable to the traditional form may also represent a phallus. Sonnet 20 is one of only two in the sequence with feminine endings to its lines; the other is Sonnet 87. Stackhouse also comments on the reveal of the gender of the addressee in the final few lines as a way of Shakespeare playing with the idea of gender throughout the poem. Stackhouse's analysis of the nature aspect also seemed to play into the "gender-bending" model by creating this idea of Mother Nature falling in love with her creation and thus imparting a phallus to him. Which is represented in