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Shall I compare you to a summer day? You’re lovelier and milder. Rough winds shake the pretty
buds of May, and summer doesn’t last nearly long enough. Sometimes the sun shines too hot,
and often its golden face is darkened by clouds. And everything beautiful stops being beautiful,
either by accident or simply in the course of nature. But your eternal summer will never fade, nor
will you lose possession of your beauty, nor shall death brag that you are wandering in the
underworld, once you’re captured in my eternal verses. As long as men are alive and have eyes
with which to see, this poem will live and keep you alive.

As it is obvious the author refers to this

The speaker opens the poem with a question addressed to the beloved: “Shall I compare thee to a
summer’s day?” The next eleven lines are devoted to such a comparison. In line 2, the speaker stipulates
what mainly differentiates the young man from the summer’s day: he is “more lovely and more
temperate.” Summer’s days tend toward extremes: they are shaken by “rough winds”; in them, the sun
(“the eye of heaven”) often shines “too hot,” or too dim. And summer is fleeting: its date is too short,
and it leads to the withering of autumn, as “every fair from fair sometime declines.” The final quatrain of
the sonnet tells how the beloved differs from the summer in that respect: his beauty will last forever
(“Thy eternal summer shall not fade...”) and never die. In the couplet, the speaker explains how the
beloved’s beauty will accomplish this feat, and not perish because it is preserved in the poem, which will
last forever; it will live “as long as men can breathe or eyes can see.”

Commentary

This sonnet is certainly the most famous in the sequence of Shakespeare’s sonnets; it may be the most
famous lyric poem in English. Among Shakespeare’s works, only lines such as “To be or not to be” and
“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” are better-known. This is not to say that it is at all the
best or most interesting or most beautiful of the sonnets; but the simplicity and loveliness of its praise of
the beloved has guaranteed its place.

On the surface, the poem is simply a statement of praise about the beauty of the beloved; summer
tends to unpleasant extremes of windiness and heat, but the beloved is always mild and temperate.
Summer is incidentally personified as the “eye of heaven” with its “gold complexion”; the imagery
throughout is simple and unaffected, with the “darling buds of May” giving way to the “eternal summer”,
which the speaker promises the beloved. The language, too, is comparatively unadorned for the sonnets;
it is not heavy with alliteration or assonance, and nearly every line is its own self-contained clause—
almost every line ends with some punctuation, which effects a pause.

Sonnet 18 is the first poem in the sonnets not to explicitly encourage the young man to have children.
The “procreation” sequence of the first 17 sonnets ended with the speaker’s realization that the young
man might not need children to preserve his beauty; he could also live, the speaker writes at the end of
Sonnet 17, “in my rhyme.” Sonnet 18, then, is the first “rhyme”—the speaker’s first attempt to preserve
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the young man’s beauty for all time. An important theme of the sonnet (as it is an important theme
throughout much of the sequence) is the power of the speaker’s poem to defy time and last forever,
carrying the beauty of the beloved down to future generations. The beloved’s “eternal summer” shall
not fade precisely because it is embodied in the sonnet: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,”
the speaker writes in the couplet, “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/shakesonnets/section2/

Analysis Of Sonnet 18 Line by Line https://owlcation.com/humanities/Summary-and-Full-Analysis-of-

Sonnet-18-by-William-Shakespeare

Sonnet 18 is devoted to praising a friend or lover, traditionally known as the 'fair youth', the sonnet
itself a guarantee that this person's beauty will be sustained. Even death will be silenced because the
lines of verse will be read by future generations, when speaker and poet and lover are no more, keeping
the fair image alive through the power of verse.

 The opening line is almost a tease, reflecting the speaker's uncertainty as he attempts to
compare his lover with a summer's day. The rhetorical question is posed for both speaker and
reader and even the metrical stance of this first line is open to conjecture. Is it pure iambic
pentameter? This comparison will not be straightforward.

This image of the perfect English summer's day is then surpassed as the second line reveals that the
lover is more lovely and more temperate. Lovely is still quite commonly used in England and carries the
same meaning (attractive, nice, beautiful) whilst temperate in Shakespeare's time meant gentle-natured,
restrained, moderate and composed.

 The second line refers directly to the lover with the use of the second person
pronoun Thou, now archaic. As the sonnet progresses however, lines 3 - 8 concentrate on the
ups and downs of the weather, and are distanced, taken along on a steady iambic rhythm
(except for line 5, see later).

Summer time in England is a hit and miss affair weather-wise. Winds blow, rain clouds gather and before
you know where you are, summer has come and gone in a week.The season seems all too short - that's
true for today as it was in Shakespeare's time - and people tend to moan when it's too hot, and grumble
when it's overcast.

 The speaker is suggesting that for most people, summer will pass all too quickly and they will
grow old, as is natural, their beauty fading with the passing of the season.

 Lines 9 - 12 turn the argument for aging on its head. The speaker states with a renewed
assurance that 'thy eternal summer shall not fade' and that his lover shall stay fair and even
cheat death and Time by becoming eternal.

 Lines 13 - 14 reinforce the idea that the speaker's (the poet's) poem will guarantee the lover
remain young, the written word becoming breath, vital energy, ensuring life continues.
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Literary Devices in Sonnet 18

With repetition, assonance, alliteration and internal and end rhyme, the reader is certainly treated to a
range of device that creates texture, music and interest.

Note the language of these lines: rough, shake, too short, Sometimes, too hot, often, dimmed, declines,
chance, changing, untrimmed.

 Assonance and repetition. There are interesting combinations within each line, which add to the
texture and soundscape: Rough/buds, shake/May, hot/heaven, eye/shines,
often/gold/complexion, fair from fair, sometimes/declines, chance/nature/changing,
nature/course.

Life is not an easy passage through Time for most, if not all people. Random events can radically alter
who we are, and we are all subject to Time's effects.

In the meantime the vagaries of the English summer weather are called up again and again as the
speaker attempts to put everything into perspective. Finally, the lover's
beauty, metaphorically an eternal summer, will be preserved forever in the poet's immmortal lines.

And those final two lines, 13 and 14, are harmony itself. Following twelve lines without any punctuated
caesura (a pause or break in the delivery of the line), line 13 has a 6/4 caesura and the last line a 4/6.
The humble comma sorts out the syntax, leaving everything in balance, giving life.

Perhaps only someone of genius could claim to have such literary powers, strong enough to preserve
the beauty of a lover, beyond even death.

Sonnet 18 Language and Tone

Note the use of the verb shall and the different tone it brings to separate lines. In the first line it refers
to the uncertainty the speaker feels. In line nine there is the sense of some kind of definite promise,
whilst line eleven conveys the idea of a command for death to remain silent.

The word beauty does not appear in this sonnet. Both summer and fair are used instead.

Thou, thee and thy are used throughout and refer directly to the lover, the fair youth.

And/Nor/So long repeat, reinforce

Iambic Pentameter in Sonnet 18

Sonnet 18 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet, 14 lines in length, made up of 3 quatrains and a

couplet. It has a regular rhyme scheme: abab cdcd efef gg. All the end rhymes are full, the exceptions
being temperate/date.

Metrical Analysis
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Sonnet 18 is written in traditional iambic pentameter but it has to be remembered that this is the
overall dominant metre (meter in USA). Certain lines contain trochees, spondees and possibly anapaests.

 Whilst some lines are pure iambic, following the pattern of

daDUM daDUMdaDUM daDUM daDUM, no stress syllable followed by a stressed syllable,
others are not.

Why is this an important issue? Well, the metre helps dictate the rhythm of a line and also how it should
be read. Take that first line for example:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

There's no doubting that this is a question so therefore the stress would normally fall on the first word,
Shall. Say it quietly to yourself and you'll find the natural thing to do is place a little more emphasis on
that opening word, because it is a question being asked. If the emphasis was on the second word, I, the
sense would be lost. So it is no longer an iamb in the first foot, but a trochee, an inverted iamb.

Shall I / compare / thee to / a sum / mer's day? (trochee, iamb x4)

 But, there is an alternative analysis of this first line, which focuses on the mild caesura (pause,
after thee) and scans an amphibrach and an anapaest in a tetrameter line:

Shall I / compare thee / to a sum / mer's day?

Here we have an interesting mix, the stress still on the opening word in the first foot, with the second
foot of non stressed, stressed, non stressed, which makes an amphibrach. The third foot is the anapaest,
the fourth the lonely iamb. There are four feet so the line is in tetrameter.

Both scans are valid because of the flexible way in which English can be read and certain words only
partially stressed. For me, when I read this opening line, the second version seems more natural because
of that faint pause after the word thee. I cannot read the opening line whilst sticking to the daDUM
daDUM iambic pentameter beat. It just doesn't ring true. You try it and find out for yourself.

Lines That Are Not Iambic Pentameter in Sonnet 18

Line 3

Again, the iambic pentameter rhythm is altered by the use of a spondee at the start, two stressed single
syllable words:

Rough winds / do shake / the dar / ling buds / of May,

This places emphasis on the meaning and gives extra weight to the rough weather.

Line 5
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Again an inversion occurs, the opening trochee replacing the iamb:

Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,

The stress is on the first syllable, after which the iambic pattern continues to the end. Note the
metaphor (eye of heaven) for the sun, and the inversion of the line grammatically, where too
hot ordinarily would be at the end of the line. This is called anastrophe, the change of order in a
sentence.

Line 11

Note the spondee, this time in the middle of the line. And a trochee opens:

Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,

The emphasis is on death brag, the double stress reinforcing the initial trochee to make quite a powerful
negation.

116 I hope I may never acknowledge any reason why minds that truly love each other shouldn’t
be joined together. Love isn’t really love if it changes when it sees the beloved change or if it
disappears when the beloved leaves. Oh no, love is a constant and unchanging light that shines
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on storms without being shaken; it is the star that guides every wandering boat. And like a star,
its value is beyond measure, though its height can be measured. Love is not under time’s power,
though time has the power to destroy rosy lips and cheeks. Love does not alter with the
passage of brief hours and weeks, but lasts until Doomsday. If I’m wrong about this and can be
proven wrong, I never wrote, and no man ever loved.

Summary: Sonnet 116

This sonnet attempts to define love, by telling both what it is and is not. In the first quatrain, the speaker
says that love—”the marriage of true minds”—is perfect and unchanging; it does not “admit
impediments,” and it does not change when it find changes in the loved one. In the second quatrain, the
speaker tells what love is through a metaphor: a guiding star to lost ships (“wand’ring barks”) that is not
susceptible to storms (it “looks on tempests and is never shaken”). In the third quatrain, the speaker
again describes what love is not: it is not susceptible to time. Though beauty fades in time as rosy lips
and cheeks come within “his bending sickle’s compass,” love does not change with hours and weeks:
instead, it “bears it out ev’n to the edge of doom.” In the couplet, the speaker attests to his certainty
that love is as he says: if his statements can be proved to be error, he declares, he must never have
written a word, and no man can ever have been in love.

Commentary

Along with Sonnets 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) and 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are
nothing like the sun”), Sonnet 116 is one of the most famous poems in the entire sequence. The
definition of love that it provides is among the most often quoted and anthologized in the poetic canon.
Essentially, this sonnet presents the extreme ideal of romantic love: it never changes, it never fades, it
outlasts death and admits no flaw. What is more, it insists that this ideal is the only love that can be
called “true”—if love is mortal, changing, or impermanent, the speaker writes, then no man ever loved.
The basic division of this poem’s argument into the various parts of the sonnet form is extremely simple:
the first quatrain says what love is not (changeable), the second quatrain says what it is (a fixed guiding
star unshaken by tempests), the third quatrain says more specifically what it is not (“time’s fool”—that is,
subject to change in the passage of time), and the couplet announces the speaker’s certainty. What
gives this poem its rhetorical and emotional power is not its complexity; rather, it is the force of its
linguistic and emotional conviction.

The language of Sonnet 116 is not remarkable for its imagery or metaphoric range. In fact, its imagery,
particularly in the third quatrain (time wielding a sickle that ravages beauty’s rosy lips and cheeks), is
rather standard within the sonnets, and its major metaphor (love as a guiding star) is hardly startling in
its originality. But the language is extraordinary in that it frames its discussion of the passion of love
within a very restrained, very intensely disciplined rhetorical structure. With a masterful control of
rhythm and variation of tone—the heavy balance of “Love’s not time’s fool” to open the third quatrain;
the declamatory “O no” to begin the second—the speaker makes an almost legalistic argument for the
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eternal passion of love, and the result is that the passion seems stronger and more urgent for the
restraint in the speaker’s tone.

sparknotes

https://owlcation.com/humanities/Summary-and-Analysis-of-Sonnet-116-by-William-Shakespeare

Analysis

Sonnet 116 has fourteen lines and a rhyme scheme ababcdcdefefgg - three quatrains and a couplet.

Most end rhymes are full except for lines 2 and 4: love/remove, 10 and 12: come/doom and 13 and
14: proved/loved. But don't forget, in Shakespeare's time some of these words may have had the same
pronunciation.

The first twelve lines build to a climax, asserting what love is by stating what it is not. The last two lines
introduce us to the first person speaker, who suggests to the reader that if all the aforementioned
'proofs' concerning love are invalid, then what's the point of his writing and what man has ever fallen in
love.

Iambic pentameter predominates - ten syllables, five beats per line - but there are exceptions in lines six,
eight and twelve, where an extra beat at the end softens the emphasis in the first two and strengthens it
in the latter.

Note the following:

 Metaphor - love is an ever-fixèd mark and also love is the star.

 in line five the words ever-fixèd mark - fixed is pronounced fix-ed, two syllables.

 in line six the word tempest which means a violent storm.

 in line seven the word bark which means ship.

 in line ten the bending sickle's compass refers to the sharp metal curved tool used for
harvesting, that cuts off the head of ripe cereal with a circular swipe or swing. Similar to the
scythe used by the Grim Reaper.

Further Analysis
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Sonnet 116 is an attempt by Shakespeare to persuade the reader of the indestructible qualities of true
love, which never changes, and is immeasurable.

But what sort of love are we talking about? Romantic love most probably, although this sonnet could be
applied to Eros, Philos or Agape - erotic love, platonic love or universal love.

Shakespeare uses the imperative Let me not to begin his persuasive tactics and he continues by using
negation with that little word not appearing four times. It's as if he's uncertain about this concept of
love and needs to state what it is NOT to make valid his point.

So love does not alter or change if circumstances around it change. If physical, mental or spiritual
change does come, love remains the same, steadfast and true.

If life is a journey, if we're all at sea, if our boat gets rocked in a violent storm we can't control, love is
there to direct us, like a lighthouse with a fixed beam, guiding us safely home. Or metaphorically
speaking love is a fixed star that can direct us should we go astray.

And, unlike beauty, love is not bound to time, it isn't a victim or subject to the effects of time. Love
transcends the hours, the weeks, any measurement, and will defy it right to the end, until Judgement
Day.

Lines nine and ten are special for the arrangement of hard and soft consonants, illiteration and
enjambment:

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love is not harvested by time's sharp edge, it endures. Love conquers all, as Virgil said in his Eclogue.
And if the reader has no faith in the writer's argument, then what use the words, and what good is the
human experience of being in love?
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A sonnet is a special form of poetry that takes its name from the Italian word sonetto,
which means “little song" or “little sound." Although English poet William Shakespeare is
famous for his plays, he also wrote 154 sonnets (not including the ones that appear
within his plays).

Sonnets are lyrical poems of 14 lines that follow a specific rhyming pattern. Sonnets
usually feature two contrasting characters, events, beliefs or emotions. Poets use
the sonnet form to examine the tension that exists between the two elements.

Several variations of sonnet structure have evolved over the years. The most common
— and the simplest — type is known as the English or Shakespearean sonnet.

Shakespearean sonnets contain 14 lines, which each have 10 syllables and are written
in iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter is a pattern in which an unstressed syllable is
followed by a stressed syllable repeated five times.

The da-DUM sound of the human heartbeat is sometimes used as an example

of iambic pentameter: da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM. The opening line
of Shakespeare's "Sonnet 12" provides a good example of the da-DUM rhythm
of iambic pentameter: When I do count the clock that tellsthe time…

Shakespearean sonnets follow a specific rhyme pattern — a-b-a-b / c-d-c-d / e-f-e-f / g-

g — and the last two lines form a rhyming couplet. Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18" —
sometimes called "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" — is one of his most
famous sonnets.

Another key element of the sonnet is the volta — or “turn" — which is the point in
the sonnet where there's a change from one rhyme pattern to another that signals a
change in subject matter. In the example above, the volta occurs in the ninth line when
the word “But" signals a subject change and the rhyme pattern changes to e-f-e-f.

In addition to the English or Shakespearean sonnet, two other popular types of sonnets
are the Spenserian sonnet (named after poet Edmund Spenser) and the Italian or
Petrarchan sonnet. These types of sonnets can be identified by their unique rhyming
patterns. There are also more obscure types of sonnets, some of which have no
recognizable rhyming pattern