Sonnet 18 Figurative Language

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (“Sonnet 18”) is one of Shakespeare’s most famous poems. It is the model English, or Shakespearean sonnet: it contains three quatrains and a finishing couplet.. The poem follows the traditional English sonnet form by having the octet introduce an idea or set up the poem, and the sestet beginning with a volta, or turn in perspective. In the octet of Sonnet 18, Shakespeare poses the question “Shall I compare the to a summer’s day” and basically begins to describe all the bad qualities of summer. He says it’s too windy, too short, too hot, and too cloudy. Eventually fall is going to come and take away all the beauty because of the changes nature brings. In the sestet, however, his tone changes as he begins to talk about his beloved’s “eternal summer” (Shakespeare line 9). This is where the turn takes place in the poem. Unlike the summer, their beauty will never fade. Not even death can stop their beauty for, according to Shakespeare, as long as people can read this poem, his lover’s beauty will continue to live. Shakespeare believes that his art is more powerful than any season and that in it beauty can be permanent.

Love is a blanket of bright and colorful flowers that covers a beautifully rolling meadow on a breezy summer day. Similar metaphorical images appear in many famous poems including Shakespeare's "Sonnet 73." The metaphor is the most basic device poets use to convey meanings beyond literal speech (Guth 473).

Indian activist, Mahatma Gandhi, once said, “Love is one of the most powerful forces of the world.” “Cyrano de Bergerac” is a French play that’s about a man who falls for a girl who doesn’t love him back. “Sonnet 18”, also known as “Shall I compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”, is one of Shakespeare's famous poems and it compares a woman to a summer day. Both brilliant allegories have many similarities in their massages despite being written almost three hundred years apart. Regardless of basic plot and word length, both stories posses surprisingly identical messages. Edmond Rostand's, “Cyrano de Bergerac”, and Shakespeare's, “Sonnet 18” both exhibit their themes of love, but while Rostand does it more through metaphors, Shakespeare does it more through personification.

Poets and authors alike evoke emotion and pictures from one single word. The imagery and thoughts put into the readers’ heads by these different writers are the base of one’s creativity and imagination while reading the author’s work of art. William Shakespeare is one of the most well-known poets of all time that is able to elicit these emotions from the reader to allow the reader to fully understand what Shakespeare is trying to accomplish with his poems. Shakespeare keeps his audience entertained with a whopping 154 sonnets, each having a different meaning and imagery associated with it. Sonnet 18, “[Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day]”, and Sonnet 55, “[Not Marble, nor the Gilded Monuments]”, are both one of Shakespeare’s most famous works. Shakespeare uses these sonnets to explore the powerful relationship between humanity, art, and time.

Explication 1. Sonnet 33 illustrates a variety of diction levels and styles, including formal, subjective and connotative For instance, Shakespeare illustrates the level of formal diction through utilizing words such as, “splendor” and “disdaineth,” illustrating an elevated tone within the piece itself, which conveys its meaning without the usage of conversational language. Moreover, Shakespeare’s usage of subjective language, specifically when discussing the similarities between the dark clouds and the man, emphasizes his own personal feelings towards the individual, which hints at his romantic affair wit him. Moreover, the usage connotative diction depicts the clouds, which normally exemplify sadness, as a sign of betrayal, since he feels

The speaker alternates between professing great love and professing great worry as he speculates about the young man’s misbehavior and the dark lady’s multiple sexual partners. As the young man and the dark lady begin an affair, the speaker imagines himself caught in a love triangle, mourning the loss of his friendship with the man and love with the woman, and he laments having fallen in love with the woman in the first place. In Sonnet 137, the speaker personifies love, calls him a simpleton, and criticizes him for removing his powers of perception. It was love that caused the speaker to make mistakes and poor judgments. Elsewhere the speaker calls love a disease as a way of demonstrating the physical pain of emotional wounds.

In William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 35: No more be grieved at that which thou has done”, the poet addresses his unfaithful lover (who has committed a “sensual fault”). Because the poet cannot bear to resent his lover, he chooses to forgive him and justifies his lover’s offense. Through the use of legal diction, biblical language, and images of paralleled objects, the poet effectively conveys his predicament; by continually excusing his lover’s mistakes, he realizes that he is only doing harm to himself as a result. The poet includes a variety of paralleled objects in the opening of the poem (lines 2-4).

Melancholy - A feeling of pensive sadness typically with no obvious case. Purging - Free someone from unwanted feelings, memory, or condition. Oppressed - To treat a person or group in an unfair way. Embassy - A mission sent by one ruler or state to another.

He spins a tale about his mistress that her beauty will remain constant and maybe, increase throughout the trials of time, “when in eternal lines to time thou grow’st”. His mistress will be immortalized throughout human time and because she is immortalized, this sonnet will also be immortalized. The speaker knows that this poem will be eternal “so long as men can breathe or eyes can see” because the beauty being described in this sonnet will forever, be remembered. Sonnet 18’s speaker uses this sonnet to do two things: make sure his mistress is honored forever and make sure this sonnet is honored along with his

Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 129” features a speaker fraught with the disappointment in fulfilled lust. Such dissatisfaction is heightened in the couplet, with the final, hyperbolic insistence that, “All this the world knows; yet none knows well/ To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.” To best understand the finality, severity, and hyperbole in such a claim, the speaker’s attitudes towards the dichotomy between lust and sex must be examined. The opening, “Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame/ Is lust in action” (1-2) establishes that the speaker views sex, “lust in action”, as a waste of energy, an act that perpetually leads to shame. They then assert that the lust itself is “perjured” (3)—a break of a vow, a promise.

In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 46, the Speaker describes a “war” between his eyes and his heart over the Young Man. In this sonnet, as is consistent with Shakespeare’s others sonnets, the Eye is used as a metaphor for Truth, which cast the Heart as Invention or fantasy. Shakespeare’s distinction between his eyes and his heart shows his anxiety about reality and fantasy when it comes to the love of the Young Man. This anxiety is similarly expressed in Roland Barthes’ figure “The Unknowable” from his book The Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Barthes describes “The Unknowable” as “Efforts of the amorous subject to understand and define the loved being ‘in itself,’ by some standard of character type, psychological or neurotic personality, independent of

Love and trust. Some people think these things are mutually exclusive. One cannot have trust without love and one cannot have love without trust. On this subject, the king of playwrights, (also known as Shakespeare) thinks otherwise. For the many of Shakespeare’s earlier sonnets, the speaker addressed the young man while later on he address the dark lady as his audience for the sonnets.

August Wilhelm Von Schlegel once stated, “Literature is the immortality of words.” Many old writers and poets are proof of this. They have been known for centuries and still are relevant to this day. This ideology can be portrayed in the lines of the famous “Sonnet 18” by William Shakespeare. The author uses heavy influences of connotation, apostrophe, and a familiar rhythm to ensure the theme of the poem.

In perhaps the most famous and well-known of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, the speaker opens this poem with a question: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (1). It is a typical sonnet in that it has a rhyme scheme, is 14 lines long, and in iambic pentameter. On the surface, this is simply a praise of the beauty of the speaker’s beloved; he is not like the unpleasant heat of the summer, he is agreeable and eternal. This subject shall never fade nor stray like summer or any other love which sometime decline.

During the Renaissance period, most poets were writing love poems about their lovers/mistresses. The poets of this time often compared love to high, unrealistic, and unattainable beauty. Shakespeare, in his sonnet 18, continues the tradition of his time by comparing the speakers' love/mistress to the summer time of the year. It is during this time of the year that the flowers and the nature that surround them are at there peak for beauty. The theme of the poem is to show the speakers true interpretation of beauty. Beauties worst enemy is time and although beauty might fade it can still live on through a person's memory or words of a poem. The speaker realizes that beauty, like the subject of the poem, will remain perfect not in the