Against that time, if ever that time come,
When I shall see thee frown on my defects,
When as thy love hath cast his utmost sum,
Call’d to that audit by advis’d respects;
Against that time when thou shalt strangely pass,
And scarcely greet me with that sun, thine eye,
When love, converted from the thing it was,
Shall reasons find of settled gravity;
Against that time do I ensconce me here
Within the knowledge of mine own desert,
And this my hand against myself uprear,
To guard the lawful reasons on thy part: To leave poor me thou hast the strength of laws, Since why to love I can allege no cause.
Sonnet 49 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 49 is an English or Shakespearean
sonnet. The English sonnet contains three
quatrains followed by a final rhyming
couplet, for a total of fourteen lines. It follows the form's typical
rhyme scheme, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, and is written in
iambic pentameter, a type of poetic
metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions. Line thirteen exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:
× / × / × / × / × /
To leave poor me thou hast the strength of laws, (49.13)