In the present text I’m going to analyse the William Shakespeare’s sonnet 20 trying to understand his message.

The title of this sonnet is “A woman's face with nature's own hand painted” and from the title I can ask myself who that woman could be, but also why she is so beautiful.

This poem is organized into three quatrains and into a couplet and another important thing about the layout is that the lines are of different length. The rhyme scheme of this poem is ABAB.

The intelligent reader understand that each stanza has a specific function: the function of the first stanza is to introduce the figure of a man who describes a woman; in the second stanza the poet wants underline his gaze. In the last stanza the poet says that the man loves everybody as well as the Nature and he analyses the role of the Nature.

In this poem the reader can find some figures of speech, indeed, there are several alliteration of the letters “h”, ”s” and “m” and also some assonance and the use of them create the rhythm of the poem; one can also find the personification of the Nature, which is described as a woman.

The language that Shakespeare used is particularly difficult to understand because there are some archaic words but despite this the reading is pleasant.

The theme of this poem is the beauty of the human beings and the love of the poet for them; this theme is represented by Oscar Wilde in the novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. This is a very famous novel about a painter who decides to paint a young man: Dorian Gray. The painter wanted to make the beauty of Dorian eternal. The sonnet and the novel present several similarities: one is that the two writers wanted to make eternal the beauty of the man and another one is that Shakespeare and Wilde loved men ( the first one in general and the second one Dorian Gray).