Sonnet 18

2 Pages 464 Words

In the sonnet “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (XVIII),” William Shakespeare uses images, metaphors, personification, and conceit to portray his theme that as long as this poem lives so does the beauty of the man he speaks of. The beloved's "eternal summer" shall not fade just because it is personified in the sonnet. The speaker has much influence in the poem to defy time and carry the beauty of the beloved down to generations forever.
The images that Shakespeare uses are simple, but capture the beauty of the beloved man. In line 3 the speakers talks of “rough winds,” and “the darling buds of May” he is using rough winds to describe the unpredictable chance and change, and he implies that his beloved does not suffer from these winds as summer does.
When the speaker assures his beloved that his “eternal summer shall not fade,” he is using summer as a metaphor for his beauty. He boasts that, unlike a summer’s day, the memory of his beloved will last forever.
The speaker personifies the sky, or “heaven,” by using the metaphor of an “eye” for the sun so that the comparison between a person and a season becomes dramatic. By assigning heaven an “eye,” the speaker uses the image of his beloved’s eyes. Similarly, in the next line when the speaker mentions that summer’s “gold complexion” is often “dimmed,” he is attempting to compare a human attribute with some trait of summer. Throughout the poem the speaker is comparing his beloved to the traits of summer.
The first line introduces the conceit of the sonnet, the comparison of the speaker’s beloved to a summer’s day. The speaker then builds on this comparison when he writes, “Thou art more lovely and more temperate” because he is describing his beloved in a way that could also describe summer. The speaker simply contrasts the life span of his poem and his beloved’s memory to the personality of a summer’s day. He brags that,...