Sonnet 137
# Sonnet 137

Sonnet 137 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare.

## Structure

Sonnet 137 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 5th line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:

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

Line 11 begins with the rightward movement of the first ictus (resulting in a four-position figure, × × / /, sometimes referred to as a minor ionic):

A minor ionic potentially occurs in line 10. Several lines (3, 7, 8, 9, 14) potentially contain either initial or mid-line reversals. The mid-line reversal of line 14 is metrically more complex:

The first ictus may fall on any of the first three words, but the complex element is "false plague": 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, "false"] ... the effect of this is to throw a degree of emphasis on it".

The meter demands that line 7's "forgèd" be pronounced as two syllables.

