The rhyme scheme of “Sonnet 29” is that of the usual
Shakespearean sonnet, but the thought is organized more or less into an octave and a
sestet, the transition being emphasized by the trochee at the beginning of line 9. The
sense of energy is also communicated by the trochee that begins line 10 and yet another
that introduces line 11, this last being especially important because by consonance and
alliteration it communicates its own energy to the new image of joy (“Like to the
lark”). As in most of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the couplet is more or less a summary of
what has preceded, but not in the same order. Line 13 summarizes the third quatrain;
line 14 looks back to (but now rejects) the earlier quatrains. Although the poem employs
numerous figures of speech from the start (e.g., personification with “Fortune,”
synecdoche with “eyes” in line 1, metonymy with “heaven” in line 3), line 11, with the
image of the lark, introduces the poem’s first readily evident figure of speech, and it
is also the most emphatic run-on line in the poem. Moreover, though heaven was “deaf” in
line 3, in line 12 it presumably hears the lark singing “hymns at heaven’s gate.”
“Sullen” in line 12 perhaps deserves some special comment too: (1) The earth is still
somber in color, though the sky is bright, and (2) applied to human beings, it suggests
the moody people who inhabit earth.
The speaker is
depressed at the beginning; by line 9, however, he begins to change his mind, and by
line 14, he would not “change his state with kings.”
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