Sonnet 29

While known as a playwright, Shakespeare also composed sonnets well worth their own fame. His collection, Sonnets, published in 1609, contains 154 sonnets in total, almost exclusively about love. With these articulate poems, Shakespeare formed a new sonnet form, the Shakespearean sonnet, having fourteen lines of iambic pentameter divided into three quatrains and a couplet and having the rhyme scheme ababcdcdefefgg. In “Sonnet 29,” Shakespeare writes about a narrator, perhaps himself, perhaps some other man, who at first …

…for his luck. Just thinking about the love of this woman brings him from depression to joy. In the couplet, Shakespeare states the narrator’s conclusion of his thoughts. Remembering the “sweet love” (13) that he shares with this woman “such wealth brings” (13), spondees placing emphasis on the emotional wealth that the woman’s love brings to the narrator. He would no longer imagine of trading places, as he had earlier, with other men, even kings.