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Sonnet 18 – William Shakespeare. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?. Mr. William Shakespeare we presume? …. Droeshout engraving Chandos Portrait Cobbe Portrait First Folio (1623).
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Sonnet 18 – William Shakespeare Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Mr. William Shakespeare we presume? …. Droeshout engraving Chandos Portrait Cobbe Portrait First Folio (1623)
Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609)A sonnet sequence: 154 sonnets1-126 – “fair youth” 127-152 – “dark lady” Joseph Fiennes as Will Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love (1998)
Sonnet 18 – William Shakespeare Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Self-reflexive or meta-textual poem • This love poem begins with a question about how to write a love poem. • Speaker/lover details the inadequacy of all metaphorical comparisons. • Sonnet form suits the argument of the poem.
Sonnet 18 – William Shakespeare Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
PoetryCritical Analysis • Two key questions: • What does the poem seek to do? • How does the poem do what it does?
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 dimmed,And every fair from fair sometime declines,By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:But thy eternal summer shall not fade,Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st, So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
What does ‘Sonnet 18’ seek to do? • Love poem • To praise the beloved • To make the reader feel what the speaker feels • To question or examine the conventions of love poetry • To illustrate what love poetry is and what it can accomplish
Shakespearean or English Sonnet • Lyric poem in iambic pentameter • Rhyme scheme ababcdcdefefgg • 3 quatrains (4 lines of verse) and a concluding couplet http://www.starve.org/teaching/intro-poetry/welcome.html