The most famous sonnet known as Sonnet 18 was composed by the Bard himself, William Shakespeare. It is believed that Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets separate from his plays. These were simply numbered in the order in which they were written and published together in 1609 by Thomas Thorpe in a work known as the Quarto. A sonnet is a 14 line poem with a particular rhyming structure.
Sonnet 18 is one of Shakespeare's best known poems. It begins with the speaker (Shakespeare) questioning whether he should compare the poem's subject to a summer's day. He concludes that the subject is even more beautiful, as even a lovely summer day can turn foul. The final two lines of Sonnet 18 say that the poem is granting the subject immortality as people will always be able to read it "as men can breathe or eyes can see."
I assume that you're referring to William Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18." It's often known by its famous first line "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?" and the speaker of the poem proceeds to do just that. But in the process he soon discovers that the object of his affections is more lovely than any summer could ever possibly be. For weather is changeable, and sometimes summer days can tend towards extremes:
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d; But thy eternal summer shall not fade.
The weather can turn quite nasty very quickly, even at the height of summer. But the "eternal summer" of the beloved will never fade. Theirs is an ideal beauty, one that transcends the world of time and change in which we all live. Thus it can never truly die. The fair youth's beauty will live on forever, immortalized in the poem for as long as it can be read.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45087/sonnet-18-shall-i-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day
No comments:
Post a Comment