Shakespeare Sonnet 18 Literary Devices Essay

Literary devices are present in all forms of writing, from poems to short stories and novels. When reading a poem or sonnet, literary devices stand out more than in novels because the writer needs to portray the message in a certain number of lines. For example, a Shakespearian sonnet contains twelve lines with a couplet at the end and written in iambic pentameter. Sonnet 18 follows the Petrarchan style, an octave followed by a sestet that contains the heroic couplet into three quatrains and a heroic couplet . Like most of his sonnets, it possesses an ababcdcdefefgg rhyme scheme. Through the use of imagery, personification and anaphoras, Shakespeare develops his theme of the stability of love and its power to immortalize his poetry and the subject of that poetry. 
Shakespeare starts the opening octave with a rhetorical question, "shall I compare thee to a summers day?"  He continues in the sonnet to compare thee to a summer’s day. He effectively paints a picture in the reader's head of a lovely summer's day through imagery. In the second line, "thou art more lovely and more temperate," he applies three different literary devices.“Thee” being “more lovely” and “more temperate” contrast the lovely summer’s day. This line also emits repetition, by repeating the word "more" he emphasizes to the reader that "thee" has great qualities. Finally this line of Sonnet 18 shows parallelism the word "more" describes two different qualities. The third line of the sonnet, "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May," strong adjectives help exude effective imagery. Starting in line three Shakespeare starts to point out the extremes and disappointments of summer. The "Rough winds" exemplify an imperfection of summer as the rough winds diminish the beauty of the “darling buds.” The disappointment of summer lies in line four when he tells the reader that, “summer's lease hath all too short a date.”  He puts personification in effect when he gives summer the power to lease,...