Analysis of Sonnet 18

Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s
day?
By William Shakespeare


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, * negative
diction

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, *volta
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
*personification
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. *poem now has
power/ eminence over the beloved.



Sonnet 118 is a love poem wherein Shakespeare praises his beloved’s
beauty and describe all the ways in which their beauty surpasses the
wonders of a summer’s day. The stability of love and its power to
immortalise someone is the overarching theme of this poem. The opening