William Shakespeare's 'Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day'

William Shakespeare's 'Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day'

William Shakespeare effectively captures the eternal summer of the youth and beauty in the lines of sonnet number 18, ‘Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day’. Shakespeare’s main literary device is to compare the beauty of the lover he is describing with summer, and then to re-enforce his idea that summer can change but the beauty of this lover is unchanging and eternal and that she is more beautiful than a perfect summer’s day. The iambic pentameter, rhyming structure and rhyming couplet helps to maintain the structure of the argument and the strong rhythm and imagery. The tone is flattering yet opinionated in the view of the lover’s beauty and how it will be preserved forever, and the feminine rhyme possibly represents the length of a summer day as well as eternal and never-ending beauty of the lover. Sonnet 18 is possibly the most well-known of Shakespeare’s love sonnets.

Shakespeare effectively uses the conceit of the summer to represent the eternal beauty of the lover, and then goes even further to state that “Thou art more lovely and more temperate” than a perfect summer day to create simplicity of the sonnet and also the amount of praise for the lover. Shakespeare uses imagery to describe the faults of summer and the sun, how “rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,” how sometimes “too hot the eye of heaven shines,” and “often is his gold complexion dimm’d”. This is done so that Shakespeare can then prove that although the lover is as beautiful as a summer’s day, she does not display the faults that summer can sometimes show. Shakespeare writes that “every fair from fair sometime declines,” to say that although summer is perfect, it will eventually end and become autumn, however the lover’s “eternal beauty shall not fade”. Shakespeare is eternalizing the beauty of the lover in his lines of verse.

In order to structure and effectively convey the argument that the lover is more beautiful than summer,...