Sonnet

"Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer Day?" (Sonnet 18)

By: William Shakespeare

(poem from poets.org)

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 dimmed;

 And every fair from fair sometime declines,

 By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed;

 But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

 Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,

 Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest 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.

Biographical Information

         William Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564, in Stratford-on-Avon. The son of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, he was probably educated at the King Edward IV Grammar School in Stratford, where he learned Latin and a little Greek and read the Roman dramatists. At eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, a woman seven or eight years his senior. Together they raised two daughters: Susanna, who was born in 1583, and Judith (whose twin brother died in boyhood), born in 1585. 

         While Shakespeare was regarded as the foremost dramatist of his time, evidence indicates that both he and his contemporaries looked to poetry, not playwriting, for enduring fame. Shakespeare's sonnets were composed between 1593 and 1601, though not published until 1609. That edition, The Sonnets of Shakespeare, consists of 154 sonnets, all written in the form of three quatrains and a couplet that is now recognized as Shakespearean. The sonnets fall into two groups: sonnets 1-126, addressed to a beloved friend, a handsome and noble young man, and sonnets 127-152, to a malignant but fascinating "Dark Lady," whom the poet loves in spite of himself. Nearly all of Shakespeare's sonnets examine the inevitable decay of time, and the immortalization of beauty and love in poetry. In his poems and plays, Shakespeare invented thousands of words, often combining or contorting Latin, French and native roots. His impressive expansion of the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, includes such words as: arch-villain, birthplace, bloodsucking, courtship, dewdrop, downstairs, fanged, heartsore, hunchbacked, leapfrog, misquote, pageantry, radiance, schoolboy, stillborn, watchdog, and zany.

           Shakespeare wrote more than 30 plays. These are usually divided into four categories: histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances. His earliest plays were primarily comedies and histories such as Henry VI and The Comedy of Errors, but in 1596, Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, his second tragedy, and over the next dozen years he would return to the form, writing the plays for which he is now best known: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. In his final years, Shakespeare turned to the romantic with Cymbeline, A Winter's Tale, and The Tempest.

(biographical information from poets.org)

Explanation of Technique

          A sonnet poem contains fourteen lines. The word, "sonnet", comes from the Italina word, "sonetto", which means a small song or lyric. Usually, there is some type of rhyme scheme in sonnet poems. There are six types of sonnet. They are Italian, Shakespearean, Spenserian, Miltonic, Terza Rima, and Curtal. The poem above is a sonnet, because it has fourteen lines and contains rhyming in it.

Interpretation of Poem

         The poem, "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer Day", is a very romantic poem by William Shakespeare. He describes his lover as lovely and temperate. Also in the poem, William Shakespeare says his lover's eternal summer shall not fade. I think this means, her beauty will continue to radiate throughout her life. Then at the end he says, she gives life to him.

(picture from psych.nyu.edu)

Visual Explanation

             The picture above is of a couple holding hands with each other and showing their affection toward one other. I think this shows what William Shakespeare's poem was about. His poem was all about love and showing compassion to the person you love.