Poetry Monday: Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare
Today, we are going to read something by one of the Western world’s most renowned writers…
William Shakespeare!
You may have heard of William Shakespeare because of his famous plays, including Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, or Macbeth, but did you know that Shakespeare also wrote over 150 sonnets?
A sonnet is a fourteen line poem.
There are some other important sonnet details, but we’ll explore some of them after we take a look at the sonnet!
Let’s check out Sonnet 18, which is sometimes called “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day” because, well, that’s the first line of the poem!
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 wand'rest 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.
You now know that a sonnet has fourteen lines, but I wonder if you can figure out what the rhyme scheme is just from reading this poem…once you’ve tried to figure it out, scroll down past the image to see the answer!
The rhyme scheme for this poem is abab cdcd efef gg, which makes it an English sonnet! English sonnets are also called Shakespearean sonnets, and I’m sure you can tell why!
There are actually two kinds of sonnets, but English sonnets are broken up into three quatrains (four lines) and one couplet). Usually there is an interesting turn between the quatrains and the couplet, and the couplet provides a strong resolution or a twist!
Do you think the couplet in this sonnet provides a strong resolution or an interesting twist? If so, what do you think it is?
Sonnets are also often about LOVE.
Remember that a good poem has strong imagery to show instead of tell. What images does Shakespeare use in this poem? What do they tell us about the person the sonnet is about? (Hint: He’s comparing them to something. What do we learn about the person from the comparison?)