Sonnet 120 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It's a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
Sonnet 120 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 4th line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:
style="border:none;background-color:transparent;margin-left:1em"> × / × / × / × / × / Unless my nerves were brass or hammer'd steel. (120.4)
Four lines (5, 7, 9, and 11) have a final extrametrical syllable or feminine ending, as for example:
style="border:none;background-color:transparent;margin-left:1em"> × / × / × / × / × /(×) For if you were by my unkindness shaken, (120.5)
/ = ictus, a metrically strong syllabic position. × = nonictus. (×) = extrametrical syllable.