Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: A Comparison of Love and Summer's Day, Study notes of Poetry

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SONNET 18

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE(1564-1616)

 English poet, playwright and actor  Regarded as the greatest writer in the English language.  Most important dramatist in the world  England’s national poet and the “Bard of Avon”  Born in Stratford-upon-Avon  Son of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden  Educated at the King Edward VI Grammar School at Stratford  Married to Anne Hathaway  Started as a small actor and later became a playwright and a producer of plays.  Major Works: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, As you Like It,Romeo and Juliet

Shakespeare’s Sonnets(1609)

 154 sonnets:  1 - 126 : addressed to-anonymous handsome young man (Fair youth)  127 - 152 : Dark Lady- Mary Fitton  153 - 154 : Cupid (regular sonnets)  Published by Thomas Thorpe and dedicated to W.H.  Francis Meres in his book Palladis Tamia reffered these sonnets as “Sugered Sonnets.”  Themes : love, passion,beauty, time, infedility, jealousy and mortality.

• Sonnet

Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day

 Addressed to a fair young man.(Fair Youth)  Falls under Fair Youth Sequence.  The poet is in search of a metaphor to compare his beloved’s beauty.  He asks if he shall compare him to a summer’s day  But he says, the young man has qualities that can even surpass a summer day  The summer day shall gradually change and diminish  But the young man’s beauty shall live forever in his sonnets, as long as people could read and write.  Focus on friendship  Tries to capture the beauty of his beloved with help of his poetry  Though it is not stated directly, it is a love poem.

st

Quartrain

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;

• Asking a rhetorical question,“Should I compare you to a summer’s day?”
• The youth’s beauty is more gentle, calm, mild and restrained than the beauty of a summer day.
• Temparate: i)externally a climate(mild temperature) and ii)internally a balance of 4 humors. (A judicious balance of these humors that determines the very existence of human beings.)
• Strong winds shake the beautiful, much loved buds of the early summer.(end of spring)
• Winds – too rough.

nd

Quartrain

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;

• Personifies the sun-regarded as the eye of heaven.
• Sometimes it is too hot.
• Sometimes its not visible especially on cloudy days
• Gives it a gold complexion. His object of comparison, which is considered as the radiant and the brightest object in the universe is subject to change. So, sun is also not an apt metaphor.
• Sun is also used as a strong Renaissance symbol for beauty.-LOVE POETRY

 All beautiful things become inferior in comparison with their essential previous state of beauty(Change happens),by chance or by the changing course of the nature without ornaments.  Core of the speaker’s philosophy.  Speaker declares that everything beautiful shall eventually fade away.  It doesn’t have a permanent charm to its credit.  Beautiful things lose their trimmings(decoration) at a particular point of time for it is Nature’s Law.  Nature’s natural change remains unchanged.(The only thing that remains unchanged is change.)-Oxymoron  Diacope-Repitition of a word or phrase with one or more words in between. “And every fair from fair sometimes decline”

 Speaker says that death shall not claim his beloved in the dark desolate valleys of death(Psalm 23:4,Biblical Allusion),for his beloved is immortal  I’m going to make him immortal.  And you will never die as you will live on my enduring poetry.  Art is immortal.  So it can immortalize mortals  death is personified in line 11.

Couplet

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

• Shatters all the metaphors used so far to represent his beloved’s beauty.
• It is the poet’s own poetry that makes his beloved immortal in the hearts of the readers. (the best metaphor)
• As long as people live and breathe, as long as eyes can see it-that is how long these verses will live, celebrating you, and continually renewing your life.