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    Sonnet 18 REPORT

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    Bea Rossette

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    Sonnet 18 REPORT

    Uploaded by

    Bea Rossette
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    Sonnet-18-REPORT

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    3 views2 pages

    Sonnet 18 REPORT

    Uploaded by

    Bea Rossette

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 2

    Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a Summer's Day?

    by William Shakespeare

    William Shakespeare
    William Shakespeare was a renowned English poet, playwright, and actor born in 1564
    in Stratford-upon-Avon. His birthday is most commonly celebrated on 23 April, which is also
    believed to be the date he died in 1616.
    Shakespeare was a prolific writer during the English Renaissance or the Early Modern
    Period. Shakespeare’s plays are perhaps his most enduring legacy, but they are not all he
    wrote. Shakespeare’s poems also remain popular to this day.
    Shakespeare is widely recognized as the greatest English poet the world has ever known. Not
    only were his plays mainly written in verse, but he also penned 154 sonnets, two long
    narrative poems and a few other minor poems. Today he has become a symbol of poetry and
    writing internationally.

    SONNET 18
    The speaker opens the poem with a question addressed to the beloved: “Shall I compare thee
    to a summer’s day?” The next eleven lines are devoted to such a comparison.
    In line 2, which I would tell is my favorite, the speaker stipulates what mainly differentiates the
    young man from the summer’s day: he is “more lovely and more temperate.”
    Summer’s days tend toward extremes: they are shaken by “rough winds”; in them, the sun
    (“the eye of heaven”) often shines “too hot,” or too dim. And summer is fleeting: its date is too
    short, and it leads to the withering of autumn, as “every fair from fair sometime declines.”
    The final quatrain of the sonnet tells how the beloved differs from the summer in that respect:
    his beauty will last forever (“Thy eternal summer shall not fade...”) and never die. In the
    couplet, the speaker explains how the beloved’s beauty will accomplish this feat, and not perish
    because it is preserved in the poem, which will last forever; it will live “as long as men can
    breathe or eyes can see.”

    THEME
    Love
    The speaker begins by comparing the man’s beauty to summer, but soon the man becomes a
    force of nature himself. In the line “thy eternal summer shall not fade,” the man suddenly
    embodies summer. As a perfect being, he is even powerful than the summer’s day to which he
    has been compared up to this point. In this way, Shakespeare suggests that love is an even
    more powerful force than nature.

    Metaphor and Symbolism


    The most prominent figure of speech used in “Sonnet 18” is the extended metaphor comparing
    Shakespeare’s lover to a summer’s day throughout the whole sonnet.

    “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate:” (lines one –
    two) is the immediate metaphor; saying that the lover is calmer than a summer’s day. Comparing the
    lover’s beauty to an eternal summer

    “But thy eternal summer shall not fade” (line nine) is a metaphor inside the sonnet-long extended
    metaphor. Along with the extended metaphor running throughout the whole sonnet, Shakespeare also
    uses imagery.

    “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,” (line three) brings the image of rough, heavy winds
    destroying small, delicate, helpless newly sprouted flowers of springtime.

    These are some example, every line contains symbolism and metaphor that has a deeper meaning.

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