Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (or nah)


I chose arguably the most famous sonnet of all time by William Shakespeare:

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 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. 

Sonnet 18 is a classic Shakespearean sonnet. It's written in fourteen lines and is in iambic pentameter. Also, there are virtually no deviations from the normal meter. In fact, while some poets will fit the form by flowing into the next line, this one manages to have each line end in its own thought. Finally, the rhyme scheme in this Sonnet is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

The volta is the turning point in the sonnet. We find this when Shakespeare writes "But thy eternal summer shall not fade/ Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;" I pinpointed this line as the volta because the tone changes from talking about nature's power to rob beauty to asserting with power that her beauty is eternal.


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