Learn more about Shakespeare! ​
Abby's Shakespeare
Project
"Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none."
Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
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;
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;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Personal Statement
I can relate to the ideas and emotions conveyed through Sonnet 18 because it reminds me of my diaries. I am intrigued by Shakespeare’s idea that one can survive in the “eternal lines” of a poem and encouraged by his praise of the power of words: words can imbue a person with eternal life. When I look back on my diaries, I can understand what Shakespeare is expressing in these lines. Even though my childhood memories have become blurred in my head, when I go back and reread my diary, those fragmentary memories reassemble into complete pictures and become clear again. In this sense, my words give eternal life to those memories and the people in them. Similarly, even after I’m dead, those words will continue giving life to my memories as long as people can “breathe” and “see”. Overall, this sonnet makes me realize the power of words and encourages me to continue writing about my life.
Literacy Analysis
In the sestet of Sonnet 18, the speaker uses personification and anaphora to suggest that literature has the power to give “eternal” life to one’s love and oneself. First, the "but" at the beginning of line 9 signals the volta that marks the beginning of the sestet, which puts forward the idea that beauty "shall not fade." In Line 11, the speaker cleverly personifies “death”, who “brag[s]” speaker’s beloved into “his shade”, subtly reflecting the power of death to destroy beauty. But here, the beauty of the speaker’s beloved resists the drag of “death” and thus does not “fade “. This distinct contrast makes readers wonder about what force maintains the “eternal” beauty, which is explained in following lines. In addition to the personification, lines 10 and 11 also emphasize the unfading beauty using two instances of the word "nor.” These similar sentence structures affirm the author's excitement at discovering the eternity of beauty. Anaphora is also used in line 13 and line 14: the repetition of “so long” manifests the importance of the statement “in eternal lines to time thou grow'st” and corresponds to the power mentioned above that protects beauty from death—literature. However, the sonnet not only illustrates the function of literature, but also celebrates the power of the poet who can make beautiful things immortal, and in turn becomes immortal.
