Question

rhyme scheme and rhythm in a sonnet by william shakespeare
\sonnet 18\
shall i compare thee to a summer’s day?
thou art more lovely and more temperate:
rough winds do shake the darling buds of may,
and summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
and often is his gold complexion dimm’d,
and every fair from fair sometime declines,
by chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:
but thy eternal summer shall not fade,
nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
when in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
so long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
so long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
amber has been asked to identify the meter of \sonnet 18.\ she is highlighting the syllables that should be stressed.
and often is his gold complexion dimm’d
which syllables should amber highlight? choose three correct answers.

• ten

is
his
gold
of-

Explanation:

Shakespeare's sonnets are written in iambic pentameter, where an iamb is a metrical foot with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Let's analyze the line "And often is his gold complexion dimm'd" by breaking it into syllables and identifying the stressed ones:

• "And" (unstressed), "often" (stressed on -ten), "is" (unstressed), "his" (stressed), "gold" (stressed), "complexion" (but we're looking at the options), "dimm'd" (but not an option). From the given options, we check each:
• "-ten" (from "often"): "often" is pronounced as /ˈɒf(ə)n/ or /ˈɔːf(ə)n/ (in some accents), but the stressed syllable is on the second part, so "-ten" (the second syllable of "often") is stressed.
• "is": unstressed (part of the iambic pattern, unstressed followed by stressed; "is" is unstressed before a stressed syllable like "his" or "gold").
• "his": stressed (follows the unstressed "is", so "his" is stressed in the iambic foot).
• "gold": stressed (follows "his", and in the iambic pattern, it's a stressed syllable).
• "of-": unstressed (from a word like "of" which is unstressed in most contexts).

So the stressed syllables from the options are "-ten", "his", and "gold".

Answer:

• -ten
• his
• gold