Sonnet 139 Sonnet 139 Sonnet 139 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. Sonnet 139 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet. The English sonnet has three quatrains, followed by a final rhyming couplet. It follows the typical rhyme scheme of the form "abab cdcd efef gg" and is composed in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions. The 6th line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter: Line 3 begins with a common metrical variation, an initial reversal: Initial reversals also occur in lines 5 and 14, and
Sonnet introduced, such as CDCDCD. Petrarch typically used an ABBA ABBA pattern for the octave, followed by either CDE CDE or CDC CDC rhymes in the sestet. The symmetries (ABBA vs. CDC) of these rhyme schemes have also been rendered in musical structure in the late 20th century composition "Scrivo in Vento" by Elliott Carter, inspired by Petrarch's Sonnet 212, "Beato in Sogno".) In English, both the English or Shakespearean sonnet, and the Italian Petrarchan sonnet are traditionally written in iambic pentameter. The first known sonnets in English, written by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, used the