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 owest;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Analysis:

It is a Shakesperean sonnet, consisting of three quatrains and a couplet, where each

line is in iambic pentameter.

The rhyming scheme is abab cdcd efef gg.

The first sentence of the sonnet, Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? , question mark is
used to make the statement into a question that the writer spent the rest of the sonnet
answering.

The second part of the sonnet which has the colon, the colon is used to further explain
why she is lovelier and then there is a comma connecting “May” and “and summer”. The writer
is connecting the reasons that thee is lovelier than the seasons. The second colon like the first
is used to explain why thee is lovelier than summer, the writer’s reason is that he/she is not
overly hot like the sun could be.
 The next two semicolons are used to connect related opinions about the sun. The next
comma is used to start a new thought on the same topic; it talks about the nature’s path. Next
is the colon used to contrast the changing nature—unlike nature, summer always returns.

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;

The next semicolon is used to connect two similar thoughts. The first one is how man
will never die and the second one; death won’t be able to brag about his death. The comma is
on the same thought.

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

The colon is used why the man will never die. That man will be forever remembered in
the poetry.

When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

The last comma is used to connect the two reasons this person will never die that as
long as people read this poetry, the person will never die.

Shakespeare changed words to fit the rhyme scheme like owest and growest.

He didn’t also used e’s in the words ending in “ed”— dimm’d and untrimm’d

Tone:

Calm and happy

Devices:

Alliteration – line 7

Consonance – line 8

Metaphor — line 5

Pangasinan State University

Urdaneta City, Pangasinan
Sonnet 18
A Poetry Analysis

Submitted by:

Liane Neill N. Bautista

ABE IV

Submitted to:

Ms. Ruby F. Amado

Instructor