Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare

Sonnet 18 is perhaps the best known of all sonnets. Shakespeare wrote 154 of them but this one tends to top most popular lists, mainly due to the opening line which every romantic knows off by heart. But there is much more to this line than meets the eye. And please be aware that not every line of every Shakespeare sonnet is written in pure iambic pentameter - a mistake made by many a supposed authority. William Shakespeare's sonnets are world renowned and are said to been written for a 'fair youth' (1 - 126) and a 'dark lady' (127 - 154), but no one is 100% certain. There are no definite names and no written evidence. Shakespeare may have been well known in his lifetime but he was also very good at keeping secrets. The sonnets were first published in 1609, seven years before his death, and their remarkable quality has kept them in the public eye ever since. Their depth and range set Shakespeare apart from all other sonneteers. His sonnet 18 focuses on the loveliness of a friend or lover, the speaker initially asking a rhetorical question comparing them to a summer's day. He then goes on to introduce the pros and cons of the weather, from an idyllic English summer's day to a less welcome dimmed sun and rough winds. In the end, it is the poetry that will keep the lover alive for ever, defying even death. Sonnet 18 Sonnet 18 Sonnet 18 | Source Analysis Of Sonnet 18 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. With repetition, alliteration and internal and end rhyme, the reader is taken along through this uncertain, changing, fateful time. Note the language of these lines: rough, shake, too short, Sometimes, too hot, often, dimmed, declines, chance, changing, untrimmed. And 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 Further Analysis of 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 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 daDUM daDUM 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. More Analysis - Lines That Are Not Iambic Pentameter 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 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. William Shakespeare William Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon. The son of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, he was probably educated at the King Edward VI Grammar School in Stratford, where he learned Latin and a little Greek and read the Roman dramatists. At eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, a woman seven or eight years his senior. Together they raised two daughters: Susanna, who was born in 1583, and Judith (whose twin brother died in boyhood), born in 1585. Little is known about Shakespeare’s activities between 1585 and 1592. Robert Greene’s A Groatsworth of Wit alludes to him as an actor and playwright. Shakespeare may have taught at school during this period, but it seems more probable that shortly after 1585 he went to London to begin his apprenticeship as an actor. Due to the plague, the London theaters were often closed between June 1592 and April 1594. During that period, Shakespeare probably had some income from his patron, Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, to whom he dedicated his first two poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). The former was a long narrative poem depicting the rejection of Venus by Adonis, his death, and the consequent disappearance of beauty from the world. Despite conservative objections to the poem’s glorification of sensuality, it was immensely popular and was reprinted six times during the nine years following its publication. In 1594, Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain’s company of actors, the most popular of the companies acting at Court. In 1599 Shakespeare joined a group of Chamberlain’s Men that would form a syndicate to build and operate a new playhouse: the Globe, which became the most famous theater of its time. With his share of the income from the Globe, Shakespeare was able to purchase New Place, his home in Stratford. While Shakespeare was regarded as the foremost dramatist of his time, evidence indicates that both he and his contemporaries looked to poetry, not playwriting, for enduring fame. Shakespeare’s sonnets were composed between 1593 and 1601, though not published until 1609. That edition, The Sonnets of Shakespeare, consists of 154 sonnets, all written in the form of three quatrains and a couplet that is now recognized as Shakespearean. The sonnets fall into two groups: sonnets 1-126, addressed to a beloved friend, a handsome and noble young man, and sonnets 127-152, to a malignant but fascinating “Dark Lady," who the poet loves in spite of himself. Nearly all of Shakespeare’s sonnets examine the inevitable decay of time, and the immortalization of beauty and love in poetry. In his poems and plays, Shakespeare invented thousands of words, often combining or contorting Latin, French, and native roots. His impressive expansion of the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, includes such words as: arch-villain, birthplace, bloodsucking, courtship, dewdrop, downstairs, fanged, heartsore, hunchbacked, leapfrog, misquote, pageantry, radiance, schoolboy, stillborn, watchdog, and zany. Shakespeare wrote more than thirty plays. These are usually divided into four categories: histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances. His earliest plays were primarily comedies and histories such as Henry VI and The Comedy of Errors, but in 1596, Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, his second tragedy, and over the next dozen years he would return to the form, writing the plays for which he is now best known: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. In his final years, Shakespeare turned to the romantic with Cymbeline, A Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Only eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays were published separately in quarto editions during his lifetime; a complete collection of his works did not appear until the publication of the First Folio in 1623, several years after his death. Nonetheless, his contemporaries recognized Shakespeare’s achievements. Francis Meres cited “honey-tongued” Shakespeare for his plays and poems in 1598, and the Chamberlain’s Men rose to become the leading dramatic company in London, installed as members of the royal household in 1603. Sometime after 1612, Shakespeare retired from the stage and returned to his home in Stratford. He drew up his will in January of 1616, which included his famous bequest to his wife of his “second best bed.” He died on April 23, 1616, and was buried two days later at Stratford Church. Selected Bibliography Poetry The Rape of Lucrece (1594) The Sonnets of Shakespeare (1609) Venus and Adonis (1593) Drama A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595) All’s Well that Ends Well (1602) Antony and Cleopatra (1607) As You Like It (1599) Coriolanus (1608) Cymbeline (1609) Hamlet (1600) Henry IV (1597) Henry V (1598) Henry VI (Parts I, II, and III) (1590) Henry VIII (1612) Julius Caesar (1599) King John (1596) King Lear (1605) Love’s Labour’s Lost (1593) Macbeth (1606) Measure for Measure (1604) Much Ado About Nothing (1598) Othello (1604) Pericles (1608) Richard II (1595) Richard III (1594) Romeo and Juliet (1596) The Comedy of Errors (1590) The Merchant of Venice (1596) The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597) The Taming of the Shrew (1593) The Tempest (1611) The Winter’s Tale (1610) Timon of Athens (1607) Titus Andronicus (1590) Troilus and Cressida (1600) Twelfth Night (1599) Two Gentlemen of Verona (1592)