Sonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?
Sonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? - form Summary
Shakespearean Sonnet's Central Turn
The poem is a Shakespearean sonnet: 14 lines in iambic pentameter with three quatrains and a concluding rhymed couplet. The quatrains develop a problem—summer’s imperfections and mortality—while the final couplet delivers the resolution: the beloved’s beauty is preserved through the poem. The formal turn (volta) around line 9 shifts argument from comparison to confident claim of poetic immortality, making form central to meaning.
Read Complete AnalysesShall 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.
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