These include, but are not limited to, alliteration, enjambment, and metaphor. Shakespeare makes use of several poetic techniques in Sonnet 16. In the later sonnets in the procreation sequence, the couplet is used to get back to the speaker’s main argument, that the Fair Youth should have children. They’re sometimes used to answer a question posed in the previous twelve lines, shift the perspective, or even change speakers. They often bring with them a turn or volta in the poem. The last two lines of Sonnet 16 are a rhyming pair, known as a couplet.

The first is unstressed and the second stressed. This means that each line contains five sets of two beats, known as metrical feet. The poem follows a consistent rhyme scheme that conforms to the pattern of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG and it is written in iambic pentameter. These are contained within a single stanza of text. This means that its made up of three quatrains, or sets of four lines, and one concluding couplet or set of two rhyming lines. It is structured in the “Shakespearean” or English form. Sonnet 16 by William Shakespeare is a sonnet made up of fourteen lines. He has to do that himself by having a child. In conclusion, he adds that time and writing can’t save him from death or decay. The speaker informs him that there are many women who could bear him a child that would help him stay young himself for ages to come. It might help to preserve something of the Fair Youth’s beauty and goodness but not like a child would.

The speaker is addressing the power, or lack thereof, of poetry.

This particular poem starts where the fifteenth sonnet left off. Sonnet 16: ‘But wherefore do not you a mightier way’ by William Shakespeare is one of the final poems in the procreation series of Fair Youth sonnets.

Shakespeare sonnet 16