Sonnet 62


Sonnet 62 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, addressed to the young man with whom Shakespeare shares an intimate but tormented connection. This sonnet brings together a number of themes that run through the cycle: the speaker's awareness of social and other differences between him and the beloved; the power and limitations of poetic art; and the puzzling sense in which love erases the boundaries between individuals.

Structure

Sonnet 62 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet, with three quatrains followed by a final rhyming couplet. It follows the form's typical rhyme scheme, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, and is composed in a type of poetic metre known as iambic pentameter based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions. The sixth line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:

 × / × / × / × / × / 
No shape so true, no truth of such account,

The first line has an initial reversal:

 / × × / × / × / × / 
Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,

Reversals can be used to bring special emphasis to words — especially action verbs, as in line ten's "beated" and line fourteen's "painting" — a practice Marina Tarlinskaja calls rhythmical italics.

Interpretations