Sonnet 68 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 68 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet. The English sonnet has three quatrains, followed by a final rhyming couplet. It follows the typical rhyme scheme of the form, 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 second line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter: × / × / × / × / × / When beauty lived and died as flowers do now, (68.2) / = ictus, a metrically strong syllabic position. × = nonictus.
The scansion of the eighth line is ambivalent. Normally the words "dead fleece" would have the stress of "dead" subordinated to that of "fleece", allowing them comfortably to fill × / positions, not / ×. However, if accent is placed on "dead", a regular scansion emerges: × / × / × / × / × / Ere beauty's dead fleece made another gay: (68.8) Alternatively, "fleece" can maintain the greater stress, suggesting this scansion: × / × / / × × / × / Ere beauty's dead fleece made another gay: (68.8) A reversal of the third ictus (as shown above) is normally preceded by at least a slight intonational break, which "dead fleece" does not allow. Peter Groves calls this a "harsh mapping", and recommends that in performance "the best thing to do is to prolong the subordinated S-syllable [here, "dead"] ... the effect of this is to throw a degree of emphasis on it".Groves 2013, pp 42-43.
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