Poem | The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare | Best story read aloud

The dedication is followed by "The Argument", a prose paragraph that summarizes the historical context of the poem, which begins in medias res.

The poem contains 1,855 lines, divided into 265 stanzas of seven lines each. The meter of each line is iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme for each stanza is ABABBCC, a format known as "rhyme royal", which has been used by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton and John Masefield.