Sonnet 120

Sonnet 120 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It's a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.

Structure

Sonnet 120 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 4th line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:


× / × / × / × / × / 
Unless my nerves were brass or hammer'd steel.

Four lines have a final extrametrical syllable or feminine ending, as for example:


 × / × / × / × / × / 
For if you were by my unkindness shaken,