Sonnet 68

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".