Shakespeare\'s Sonnet 18 William Shakespeare\'s

Shakespeare's Sonnet 18

William Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 is a lyric love poem in which the speaker lauds the enduring youthfulness and beauty of his beloved. The voice of the poem is the speaker, an unidentified love-struck narrator. What the sonnet lacks in specific setting in time or place it makes up for in rich imagery and metaphor, contributing to the timelessness of the verse. In Sonnet 18 the speaker compares his lover to a summer's day, concluding that her beauty and magnificence are far superior.

The opening line is a rhetorical question that seemingly responds to a dare: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" The question sets the tone and mood of the poem, which is lighthearted and fun, and also introduces the central extended metaphor. The second line is the speaker's immediate answer to his own question: "Thou art more lovely and more temperate." As such, the line summarizes the entire sonnet. Repetition of the word "more" underscores his feeling and intent to place his beloved above the wonders of nature. The next several lines describe summer's weaknesses: rough winds in line three; too short of a season in line four; the sun is too hot in line five, and the sun is too often obscured by clouds in line six. Furthermore, lines seven and eight denote the impermanence of nature's beauty: "every fair from fair sometimes declines, / by chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd." Again, the poet employs repetition (of the word "fair") to emphasize his point. Moreover, "chance" and "changing" provide some alliteration, which is otherwise rare in this particular Shakespeare sonnet.

Line nine begins with the word "But," to herald a shift in tone: the speaker went from listing summer's deficiencies to pointing out the particular qualities of his lover that make her superior. The speaker focuses almost exclusively on her "eternal summer" that "shall not fade," (line 9). She will never lose possession of "that fair," or her beauty, and even Death cannot claim her (lines 10, 11). In line 12 the speaker takes partial responsibility for her immortality, for "in eternal lines" she "growest" in stature.