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
Like its 153 fellows, this is a Shakespearian sonnet, which means that its rhyme scheme runs something like this:
ABAB
CDCD
EFEF
GG
Like most of Shakespeare's poetry, Shall I Compare Thee... is in Iambic Pentameter (this means the meter contains five iambs per line, an iamb being two syllables the first unstressed, the second stressed). The flow of the poem is very much like speaking. Shakespeare used iambic pentameter for most of the dialogue in his plays, largely for noble characters. This says something about the class of the speaker.
The subject matter of this poem is, in my opinion, lighter than my previous choice. It's a love poem, although the main subject matter is less Love and more the concept of Beauty. The speaker is comparing the looks of his lover to the beauty of summer. Through the first two quatrains , he discusses the flaws of a summer day. In the third one, there's a volta, a turn in the subject matter, where the speaker tells us about why his lover is better than summer, because her beauty will outlast the summer (a volta is a leftover from an earlier form, the Petrarchan sonnet, which were literally all love poems). Despite said lover being a human, and thus doomed to die eventually, the poem immortalizes her, keeping her features alive forever.
This poem is a good example of courtly love. Courtly love is a concept of romance that revolves largely around worship from afar. In most examples of courtly love, the worshipper views the object of their affection as an idol, to be admired and adored, but not interacted with. Earlier, I pointed out that, in Shakespeare, iambic pentameter is commonly used for noble characters. Following this, the speaker could be seen as a young gentleman, writing a poem about the object of his distant affection.
Up Next: The Lady Of Shalott, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
ABAB
CDCD
EFEF
GG
Like most of Shakespeare's poetry, Shall I Compare Thee... is in Iambic Pentameter (this means the meter contains five iambs per line, an iamb being two syllables the first unstressed, the second stressed). The flow of the poem is very much like speaking. Shakespeare used iambic pentameter for most of the dialogue in his plays, largely for noble characters. This says something about the class of the speaker.
The subject matter of this poem is, in my opinion, lighter than my previous choice. It's a love poem, although the main subject matter is less Love and more the concept of Beauty. The speaker is comparing the looks of his lover to the beauty of summer. Through the first two quatrains , he discusses the flaws of a summer day. In the third one, there's a volta, a turn in the subject matter, where the speaker tells us about why his lover is better than summer, because her beauty will outlast the summer (a volta is a leftover from an earlier form, the Petrarchan sonnet, which were literally all love poems). Despite said lover being a human, and thus doomed to die eventually, the poem immortalizes her, keeping her features alive forever.
This poem is a good example of courtly love. Courtly love is a concept of romance that revolves largely around worship from afar. In most examples of courtly love, the worshipper views the object of their affection as an idol, to be admired and adored, but not interacted with. Earlier, I pointed out that, in Shakespeare, iambic pentameter is commonly used for noble characters. Following this, the speaker could be seen as a young gentleman, writing a poem about the object of his distant affection.
Up Next: The Lady Of Shalott, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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