Sonnet 53
Shakespeare's Sonnet 53, presumably addressed to the same young man as the other sonnets in the first part of the sequence, raises some of the most common themes of the sonnet: the sublime beauty of the beloved, the weight of tradition, and the nature and extent of art's power. As in Sonnet 20, the beloved's beauty is compared to both a man's and a woman's.
Structure
Sonnet 53 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet. The Shakespearean sonnet contains three quatrains followed by a final rhyming couplet. It follows the typical rhyme scheme of this form, abab cdcd efef gg and is composed in a type of poetic metre called iambic pentameter based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions. The seventh line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:
× / × / × / × / × /
On Helen's cheek all art of beauty set,