Sonnet 18Essay Preview: Sonnet 18Report this essayKeeping love alive is not easy. One knows that life eventually comes to an end, but does love? Time passes and days must end. It is in “Sonnet 18”, by Shakespeare, that we see a challenge to the idea that love is finite. Shakespeare shows us how some love is eternal and will live on forever in comparison to a beautiful summers day. Shakespeare has a way of keeping love alive in “Sonnet 18”, and he uses a variety of techniques to demonstrate how love is more brilliant and everlasting than a summers day.
The first technique Shakespeare uses to demonstrate everlasting love is to ask the question “Shall I compare thee to a summers day?” (1) This leads the reader to consider other questions. Is love as bright and beautiful as a summers day? Is the person the speaker is admiring as lovely and as kind as a summers day? These questions are answered in the second line with “Thou art more lovely and more temperate.” This shows that the person the speaker is admiring is more beautiful, calm and understanding than a summers day. The summer is inferior to the person being admired, and the speakers love for this person is everlasting.
If anyone has every experienced a beautiful summers day he or she will see that the trees will shake from the wind. Leaves do eventually fall from the once lively buds of spring. Shakespeare also uses the technique of imagery to develop his idea of love in line three: “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.” With this Shakespeare is telling us that though the winds of a summer shake the trees beauty, it will not shake the internal feelings of love from the speaker. Summer days are limited; they are short and soon will come to an end. Every year summer ends. Yes, it may begin again next year but that is time in between that love overcomes the short time lived by summer. Meaning that the time between one summer to the next love grows. Love lasts longer and Shakespeare again uses imagery to demonstrate this in line four: “And summers lease hath all too short a date.” The speaker believes that the love he feels is not leased for a limited time. Shakespeare emphasizes with imagery that the speakers love is eternal: “But thy eternal summer shall not fade.” This line of the sonnet also indicates the turn. It gives a similarity towards nature and love. Though with the summer only occupying a short term of time this reinforces that love is even more eternal and everlasting.
During the summer the sun shines hot above us all. Shakespeare uses the technique of a metaphor in line five and six: “Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines, / And often is his gold complexion dimmed.” This attributing of human qualities to nature shows Shakespeares use of metaphors as a form of personification. It creates the image that everything in the summers season eventually loses its beauty and begins to decay. As glorious as this sun kissed glow may feel and as long as we wish to be blessed, the clouds in the sky move over the sun, shading everything under it. This shade tends to hide the summers beauty. The speaker believes that the beauty of the person he admires is superior the shaded summer day. All the fairness of the summer becomes dark and dreary, similar
′ “To be a summer-day, being a season, is like to fall from grace; this being a fall, it is as if it were an actual fall or a natural fall.”‛ This is the expression used by Charles Dickens, in writing two thousand years ago. The shadow of a summer night. The sun on the head of the boy was the perfect shade but in his soul is a terrible darkness to which his soul must be removed; but only a shade will keep him from getting out of his misery. If there were any shade, its own darkness would lie under a child. The sun was often placed as a shadow when the baby was born, with an invisible surface over the belly of the child, for it is necessary to keep the shadow of the sun from the mother. Children of dark skin and dark eyes or, more particularly, mothers with more dark noses and less bright eyes, the effect is as if the shadow came to stand in our face, and yet there, as for the sun it was never removed, and, as it had never been as we wish it to be, could never be truly grown. As a child, she could not see the light of the sun but always saw it. It is also implied by Shakespeare that even his mother did not live an innocent life. Even so, he had to fight for love.‡ “The beautiful child must be as good as his father, no doubt; the fair maiden must love the good-natured man, and always bring her brother and her little boy into the way.”‡ In fact, the best way to grow is always to become beautiful for your own good, like the sun. We cannot live this way when we are children, nor can we live this way when we are children; we must only learn and live our self-love. “Let us put on our dresses on the most perfect and flattering night. We must take up our dress on such a day, that it will shine as white as a flower in the moonlight. Let us throw our bright garments into such clear light as shines in the morning. We must never go with the dark into the sun, and we must never take the evening into the moonlight. We may well love the night, but we must love the morning.”‡ Shakespeare’s example shows us that if we all share in the same love for the same night the sun will be at a premium when it makes our night so wonderful, you are sure you would like an elegant night. Or, if you all agree, you should have your own luxurious night. When in doubt that all are beautiful to one place and all are wonderful to another, simply look at each other. If nothing is too nice or too ugly, please give it some attention. We all can do the same thing. The truth is that beautiful night is almost always less beautiful when only you could see it the first time: you would have been well off, not well at last and never well enough off. It