William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 contains 14 lines.
The poem is an English sonnet, a form traditionally made up of 14 lines written in iambic pentameter. It begins with the famous question, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” and develops a comparison between the beloved’s beauty and the changing, temporary qualities of summer.
Sonnet 18 uses three quatrains followed by a concluding couplet. The three four-line sections develop the argument, while the final two lines claim that the beloved will live through the poem’s enduring words. Its rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, a standard pattern for Shakespearean sonnets.
Readers sometimes confuse the poem’s line count with its number in Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence. The number 18 identifies its position in the collection, not the number of lines it contains. Like the other poems in the sequence, it is conventionally counted as a 14-line sonnet.