Sonnet 74

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Sonnet 74

Sonnet 74 1609.jpg

–William Shakespeare

Sonnet 74 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.

Synopsis

The sonnet states that the poet's death should not concern the Youth, since the body is unimportant, while the spirit remains expressed in the sonnet itself, as a memorial of the immortality of the human soul.

Structure

Sonnet 74 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 tenth line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:

  ×   /  ×   /      ×  / ×  /×    / 
The prey of worms, my body being dead; (74.10)

/ = ictus, a metrically strong syllabic position. × = nonictus.

The meter demands a few variant pronunciations: line 4's "memorial" counts as 3 syllables, line 8's "spirit" counts as 1 (possibly pronounced as spear't, sprite, sprit, or spurt), and line 12's "rememberèd" is expanded to 4.

References

First edition and facsimile

Variorum editions

Modern critical editions

• online text