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Now, through the power of his poetry, William Shakespeare the writer is offering the young man another way of becoming immortal.
Sonnet 18 series#
H.’), but it is suggestive that Sonnet 18, in which Shakespeare proudly announces his intention of immortalising the Fair Youth with his pen, follows a series of sonnets in which Shakespeare’s pen had urged the Fair Youth to marry and sire offspring as his one chance of immortality.
Sonnet 18 full#
We cannot be sure who arranged the sonnets into the order in which they were printed in 1609 (in the first full printing of the poems, featuring that enigmatic dedication to ‘Mr W. This is significant, following Booth, if we wish to analysis Sonnet 18 (or ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ if you’d prefer) in the context of the preceding sonnets, which had been concerned with procreation. It’s worth bearing in mind that Shakespeare had referred to these lines of life in Sonnet 16.
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So, as Booth points out, ‘eternal lines’ are threads that are never cut. a long thread would mean a long life, and a short thread would mean you’d be cut down in your prime. Everyone’s life span was decided by the Fates, who cut a thread of corresponding length, i.e. However, as Booth notes, this is probably also an allusion to the lines of life, the threads spun by the Fates in classical mythology. In such an analysis, then, ‘eternal lines’ prefigure Shakespeare’s own immortal lines of poetry, designed to give immortality to the poem’s addressee, the Fair Youth. ‘When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st’: it’s worth observing the suggestion of self-referentiality here, with ‘lines’ summoning the lines of Shakespeare’s verse. As Stephen Booth points out in the detailed notes to this sonnet in his indispensable edition Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Yale Nota Bene), the brightness of that all-too-fleeting summer’s day has been declining ever since the poem’s opening line: ‘dimmed’, ‘declines’, ‘fade’, ‘shade’. In terms of imagery, the reference to Death bragging ‘thou wander’st in his shade’, as well as calling up the words from the 23rd Psalm (‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death’), also fits neatly into the poem’s broader use of summer/sun imagery. This reinforces the inferiority of the summer with its changeability but also its brevity (‘sometime’ in Shakespeare’s time meant not only ‘sometimes’, suggesting variability and inconstancy, but also ‘once’ or ‘formerly’, suggesting something that is over).
Sonnet 18 skin#
Shakespeare gives the sun a "complexion", which usually refers to the skin one’s face.There is an easy music to the poem, set up by that opening line: look at repetition of ‘summer’ and ‘some’, which strikes us as natural and not contrived, unlike some of the effects Shakespeare had created in the earlier sonnets: ‘summer’s day’, ‘summer’s lease’, ‘Sometime too hot’, ‘sometime declines’, ‘eternal summer’. He calls the sun the "eye of heaven" and refers to it using the word "his". These lines are saying that sometimes the sun is too hot, and other times you can’t even see it at all, hidden by clouds. Shakespeare also uses personification in lines five and six when he writes, “Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d ”(5-6). This means that whether is a metaphor to a rentable property. The word “lease”, used to describes the short summer, is the same word meaning a contract by which one party conveys land, property, services, etc., to another for a specified time. What he is saying is that the strong summer winds is a threat to the new flower buds that popped up in May, and summer won’t last very long and that it is fated to end. Both words are usually applied to human characteristics. In these two lines, winds are able to “shake” things and buds are described as “darlings”. But near the end in his sestets, Sonnet 18 takes a …show more content… Shakespeare uses personification in lines three and four when he states, “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:”(3-4). In contrast to his beloved in being mild/constant and beautiful, he continues in his octave to describe summer as season with that brings unpleasant extremes of windiness and heat. In Sonnet 18’s octave, he starts off with a question and a quick statement of his beloved “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate:”(1-2). It is as if Shakespeare is describing his beloved as a perfect being. The sonnet starts off by praising a beloved’s beauty and, as we slowly progress through the rest of the sonnet, transform this beloved’s beauty into something almost immortal. Show More Sonnet 18, written by William Shakespeare, is the most popular amongst his other 154 sonnets.