The Sonnets

In addition to his plays, Shakespeare also wrote 154 sonnets and five longer poems. A Shakespearean sonnet is a 14-line poem. Every other line rhymes and the last two lines rhyme. His sonnets are written in what is known as "iambic pentameter," which means each line has 10 syllables. The syllables are grouped into five pairs consisting of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. The first line of the sonnet below, which is one of the most famous, would be accented like this: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day."

Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

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