Sonnet 61

Sonnet 61 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.

Structure

Sonnet 61 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet, containing three quatrains followed by a final rhyming couplet. It follows the form's typical rhyme scheme, 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 seventh line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:


 × / × / × / × / × / 
To find out shames and idle hours in me,

The first and third lines have a final extrameterical syllable or feminine ending:


 × / × / × / × / × / 
Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,

Although many rhymes in the sonnets are imperfect in today's pronunciation, they were almost all perfect in Shakespeare's day. The a rhymes, "open" and "broken" constitute a rare instance of an imperfect rhyme in the Sonnets, though the same rhyme occurs in Venus and Adonis lines 47 and 48.