‘Sonnet 53’ by William Shakespeare is a devotional poem that expresses the speaker’s admiration for the beauty of the Fair Youth. Throughout the poem, Shakespeare uses figurative language to describe the nature of the youth. He is more beautiful than Adonis, Helen, the spring and the fall.

Sonnet 53 is one of the “Fair Youth” sequence of sonnets, (from 1 to 123) in praise of the beautiful young man loved by Shakespeare. In this sonnet the Bard explores themes of male and female beauty, in a way that compares to Sonnet 20.