User:N.mckinley98/sandbox

=Shakespeare's Sonnet=

Sonnet 18
"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 dimm'd;
 * And every fair from fair sometime declines,
 * By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
 * But thy eternal summer shall not fade
 * Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
 * Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st 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.

About Shakespeare
William Shakespeare(23 April 1564 to 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist. Shakespeare was born in Stratford Upon Avon, Warwickshire and sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. In 1599, a partnership of members of the company built their own theatre on the south bank of the River Thames, which they named the Globe

Brief Analysis

 * In Sonnet 18, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?", William Shakespeare reminds his friend

that although physical beauty inevitably disappears ("And every fair from fair sometime declines"[7]), his friend will exist in an "eternal summer" (9) by means of the poet's "eternal lines" (12).


 * Editors and critics seem universally to have assumed that "complexion" in line 6 refers only to

physical appearance in the face and that it points to the face of the personified sun. In other words, the face of the sun is dimmed by clouds at times, and thus the beauty of its face is destroyed, in contrast to the beauty of the young man being addressed in the sonnet


 * The poet starts the praise of his dear friend without ostentation, but he slowly builds the image

of his friend into that of a perfect being. His friend is first compared to summer in the octave, but, at the start of the third quatrain (9), he is summer, and thus, he has metamorphosed into the standard by which true beauty can and should be judged.


 * The poet's only answer to such profound joy and beauty is to ensure that his friend be forever in human memory, saved from the oblivion that accompanies death. He achieves this through his verse, believing that, as history writes itself, his friend will become one with time. The final couplet reaffirms the poet's hope that as long as there is breath in mankind, his poetry too will live on, and ensure the immortality of his muse.