Comparison of Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 and 18
The best way to tackle Sonnet 18 is by breaking up the Quatrains and the Couplet. The first thing to look at is the opening stanza:
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:
The first thing to note is line one. It is a prompt. Looking at the sonnets in a bigger picture it is comprised into two sentences. Shakespeare asks us, and more reasonably, himself, if he shall compare his target to a summer’s day. Is it a writer’s exercise? Is he acting in sincerity – trying to figure out the sheer definition of the subject before him? Those questions are things hard to analyze without taking into some outside-of-the-text information and need more of a complete view of the poem to develop any context. But, as first lines go, it establishes quite the subject matter for the next 13 lines.
The second line gives us a visualization of who Shakespeare is encapsulating, regardless of the actual identity of the person. The subject is more lovely and more temperate than a summer’s day. What do we know about a summer’s day? It is fleeting – here today and gone tomorrow – and it is often associated with images of true beauty: flowers, animals, weather and the emotions one may feel staring at their loved one in the middle of all of these other images. So, if the subject is more lovely and more temperate, the subject must have the extended qualities of these days. Summer in a person would be a person full of flush life, eager to attack the fall of tomorrow but willing to bask in the sunshine of the day.
The last two lines of the quatrain are the beginning of Shakespeare’s observations on summer, which could be looked at as his views on the brevity of life. Regardless of who Shakespeare’s subject is, these two lines – and the entire second stanza, as we will see – tell us the qualities of summer. Line three tells us “Rough winds do shake the darling
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:
The first thing to note is line one. It is a prompt. Looking at the sonnets in a bigger picture it is comprised into two sentences. Shakespeare asks us, and more reasonably, himself, if he shall compare his target to a summer’s day. Is it a writer’s exercise? Is he acting in sincerity – trying to figure out the sheer definition of the subject before him? Those questions are things hard to analyze without taking into some outside-of-the-text information and need more of a complete view of the poem to develop any context. But, as first lines go, it establishes quite the subject matter for the next 13 lines.
The second line gives us a visualization of who Shakespeare is encapsulating, regardless of the actual identity of the person. The subject is more lovely and more temperate than a summer’s day. What do we know about a summer’s day? It is fleeting – here today and gone tomorrow – and it is often associated with images of true beauty: flowers, animals, weather and the emotions one may feel staring at their loved one in the middle of all of these other images. So, if the subject is more lovely and more temperate, the subject must have the extended qualities of these days. Summer in a person would be a person full of flush life, eager to attack the fall of tomorrow but willing to bask in the sunshine of the day.
The last two lines of the quatrain are the beginning of Shakespeare’s observations on summer, which could be looked at as his views on the brevity of life. Regardless of who Shakespeare’s subject is, these two lines – and the entire second stanza, as we will see – tell us the qualities of summer. Line three tells us “Rough winds do shake the darling