Sonnet 20 Sonnet 20 Sonnet 20 is one of the best-known of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. Part of the Fair Youth sequence (which comprises sonnets 1-126), the subject of the sonnet is widely interpreted as being male, thereby raising questions about the sexuality of its author. In this sonnet (as in, for example, Sonnet 53) the beloved's beauty is compared to both a man's and a woman's. Sonnet 20 is a typical English or Shakespearean sonnet, containing three quatrains and a couplet for a total of fourteen lines. It follows the rhyme scheme of this
Sonnet 54 scheme of the English sonnet, "abab cdcd efef gg" and is composed in iambic pentameter, a type of metre in which each line has five feet, and each foot has two syllables that are accented weak/strong. The fifth line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter: The sixth and eighth lines end with feminine endings. Sonnet 54 by William Shakespeare is divided into three quatrains and one heroic couplet. The first two quatrains work together, illustrating both the scentless canker bloom and the scented rose. In the first two lines of the first quatrain he says that beauty seems more beauteous as