Interest Concentrated: Poems Concentrated Ed 7

Sonnet 18, 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 oft’ 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 owest;

Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

It’s a Shakespeare! You didn’t think I could make a series called Poems Concentrated without having a Shakespeare in too, did you? Well, I couldn’t. He’s basically the creator or modern English, and the world’s greatest playwright, and more or less the person who popularised poetry and cinema. Not that I like him much. How he makes people suffer with that creation. His plays, his poems, his life (ooh, that part is not very… um… civil?), how modern literature makes us study them. But I guess it’s like tax. It’s painfully to give, it makes you suffer sometimes, but in the end, it’s all for your good (they say). But face, who wouldn’t like to show off their knowledge to someone and make them suffer listening to you. I don’t about you, but I definitely would. Now, where were we? Oh, yeah, moving on.

So, you might have noticed this is a ‘sonnet’. What’s a sonnet? If you didn’t know (I didn’t. Am I certified to do this poems section? No, not technically. But I like doing it, and I am learning), let me differentiate between a poem and sonnet. A sonnet is a poem. But it’s a very precise type of poem. A sonnet comprises of 14 rhyming lines of the same length. It splits up into three more different types, Italian sonnet, English sonnet and Spenserian sonnet. In an English sonnet, three groups of four lines with cross-rhyme pattern (abab, cdcd, efef) are followed by a final couplet (rhymed gg). An Italian sonnet is slightly different, and I’m not going explain all that. I got my info from http://www.differencebetween.info/difference-between-poem-and-sonnet, head over there if you want to know more.

(Also, fun fact, the term sonnet derives from the Italian word sonetto and means "little song".)

Sonnet 18 is an English style sonnet. The art of writing sonnet originates from Italy, but it was Shakespeare who popularised it again. He mostly created the English sonnet genre (gee, I wish I had that freedom. Muck up making a proper sonnet, but then realise that I can just rename it and make it a new genre). It’s a love poem, and it’s just one of the 154 sonnets Shakespeare wrote in his lifetime (remember that number, 154, if you study Lit. It’s an important number). It is also one of his most famous.

If you analyse it, as always, it’s full of hidden gems, as is the way with Shakespeare poems. You’ll find scholars going hand to hand trying explain what they think the hidden meaning is. That’s what I love about Shakespeare. There is always something hidden under the words, and everyone goes crazy trying to find them, and sometimes when I read their theories, I wonder if Shakespeare himself actually meant that to happen! Just a tiny mistake he made writing it, a slip of the brain, and 500 years later, it’s more important that starvation in Africa.

Oh dear. I’m going far away from the topic than I’d like. Let’s move back onto the poem. Rather sonnet. What do you think of it? Personally, I, without wanting to sound like an idiot, like some of Rayhaan’s poems better. That’s just me. On my thoughts of the poem though. There is this almost sarcastic tone of love in it. He compares her to a summer day. How calm, how temperate she is. But consider this. Shakespeare lived in Britain. I live in Britain. I’ve known days where the morning starts off so beautifully, so calmly, and you get out the bikes to cycling, and bang, it’s cloudy and going to rain. That’s the British weather is. It’s far from calm and temperate. You see what these scholars argue about? Everything is different depending on what your point of view is. Of course he then goes on to talk about how bad the summer day is, and how much better she is, but again, point of view. It’s different.

You probably don’t know what I was elaborating. It’s all in the summary. But I’m also about to reach a 1000 words. So that mean it’s time to finish up this edition of Poems Concentrated. But don’t worry. I’m going to leave you some sites to check out if you want more to read about this poem and all that’s related.

Here’s the summary from great website Shmoop (link given below):

The speaker begins by asking whether he should or will compare "thee" to a summer day. He says that his beloved is lovelier and more even-tempered. He then runs off a list of reasons why summer isn’t all that great: winds shake the buds that emerged in Spring, summer ends too quickly, and the sun can get too hot or be obscured by clouds.

He goes on, saying that everything beautiful eventually fades by chance or by nature’s inevitable changes. Coming back to the beloved, though, he argues that his or her summer (or happy, beautiful years) won’t go away, nor will his or her beauty fade away. Moreover, death will never be able to take the beloved, since the beloved exists in eternal lines (meaning poetry). The speaker concludes that as long as humans exist and can see (so as to read), the poem he’s writing will live on, allowing the beloved to keep living as well. http://www.shmoop.com/sonnet-18/summary.html

And here’s some sites you can check out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet_18

http://www.shmoop.com/sonnet-18/#

https://goo.gl/kZOgO4

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And finally, thank you for reading! Hope you enjoyed it!

You might enjoy our series of Poems Concentrated:

Edition 1: http://interestconcentrated.blogspot.co.uk/p/poems-concentrated.html

Edition 2: http://interestconcentrated.blogspot.co.uk/p/poems-concentrated-ed-2.html

Edition 3: http://interestconcentrated.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/poems-concentrated-ed3.html

Edition 4: http://interestconcentrated.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/poems-concentrated-ed4.html

Edition 5: http://interestconcentrated.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/poetry-concentrated-ed5.html

Edition 6: http://interestconcentrated.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/poems-concentrated-ed-6.html

Check out Rayhaan's stories:

Flipside 1: http://interestconcentrated.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/the-closed-door.html
Flipside 2: http://interestconcentrated.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/flipside-2.html

Flipside 3: http://interestconcentrated.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/flipside-3.html

Check my stories: