While known as a playwright, Shakespeare also composed sonnets well worth their own fame. His collection, Sonnets, published in 1609, contains 154 sonnets in total, almost exclusively about love. With these articulate poems, Shakespeare formed a new sonnet form, the Shakespearean sonnet, having fourteen lines of iambic pentameter divided into three quatrains and a couplet and having the rhyme scheme ababcdcdefefgg. In "Sonnet 29," Shakespeare writes about a narrator, perhaps himself, perhaps some other man, who at first feels depressed and unlucky, then becomes uplifted by the love that he shares with a woman.
             In the first quatrain of "Sonnet 29," the narrator speaks of the pity that he feels for himself and his unlucky state. He feels that "Fortune" (1) does not favor him, and that mankind, symbolized by "men's eyes" (1), looks down upon him. He feels all alone; he cries and vainly asks for help from "deaf heaven" (3), a spondee signifying that even heaven and God will not help him. Extremely depressed, he can do nothing else but feel sorry for himself.
             The next quatrain describes how the narrator wishes he had the privileges that other men have. He wishes that he were "more rich in hope" (5), more handsome, more popular, more skilled as a writer, and more powerful. Then, he reiterates his sorrow by stating, "what I most enjoy [is] contented least" (8), meaning that he has the least of what he wants the most. Shakespeare uses much parallelism in this quatrain to emphasize the multitude of traits the narrator wishes he possessed and the unhappiness of his present state.
             The third quatrain brings the turn of the sonnet. The contrast word, "Yet," signifies a change of tone. The narrator suddenly thinks of his beloved woman and recants his self-pitying thoughts. His state is now "like to the lark" (11), a simile with allit...