Shakespearean Sonnets: Form, Rhyming And Content In Poetry

Shakespearean Sonnets: Form, Rhyming, and Content in Poetry “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” by William Shakespeare is an English sonnet that discusses the speaker’s feelings for an unnamed woman. While the speaker is not very flattering when it comes to his description, there is contrast in the speaker’s feelings as to how to he describes her. The form of the sonnet helps to organize the thoughts of the speaker and eventually reveal his feelings about the woman in the poem. Since the sonnet is English, it is broken up into four parts. There are three quatrains; the first is from lines 1-4, the second from lines 5-8, and the last from lines 9-12. The last two lines form a couplet. The whole sonnet follows a pattern of having two lines describing a single aspect of the subject of the poem, or the apostrophe. The aspects include her eyes, skin, hair, color, smell, voice, and the way she walks. The quatrains are the ones that focus solely on the description. It is only in the first line and the last line the quatrains are the only times the speaker directly addresses who the apostrophe is: “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” (line 1) and “My mistress, …show more content…
The rhyme scheme is also typical, as it follows the abab cdcd efef gg set up. Each quatrain switches off with end rhymes, so for example, in the first quatrain “sun” (line 1) corresponds to “dun” (line 3), and “red” (line 2) corresponds with “head” (line 4). The second are third quatrain are the same. The couplet at the end breaks the alternating pattern, and they form a neat end rhyme with “rare” (line 13) and “compare” (line 14). The effect of that type of rhyme scheme ties together the quatrains with the end rhymes and sets apart the couplet from the rest of the poem. It serves as an effective conclusion to what is being