Thematic Analysis of Sonnet 18

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Sonnet 18, one of the first of Shakespeare's sonnets to be become famous, is largely concerned with poetry. Thus it offers itself both as an introduction to a selection of great English poems from Elizabethan times to Worth War II, and to an understanding of poetry through a series of analyses and interpretations. Immediately the speaker tried to catch and keep the reader's attention with a rhetorical question (1), proposing a comparison ("Shall I . . .") of an addressed somebody ("thee"), who remains unidentified through the whole poem, to "a Summer's day". He simply seems about to embark on a flattering praise of a beautiful person. But while the comparison is made in detail in the following three quatrains (2-12), it becomes apparent at the same time that what at first seemed to be flattering suggestion was, in fact, nothing more than the introduction to an extended investigation of that comparison's inadequacy. It was based, the speaker tells us, on certain spurious likenesses between two different phenomena (2-8). Though either can boast of beauty, a summer day cannot properly compare with the praised person. This person's beauty, the speaker maintains by forming a strong antithesis in the third quatrain ("but they eternal Summer..."), is eternal. So, at the end of the poem, when producing this paradox of somebody's "eternal Summer", he makes the reader wonder how a person's beauty, transitory as it needs must be, could ever become eternal. But since an understanding of the couplet (13-14), though on the whole more direct in the choice of words, still heavily depends on the reference of indefinite pronouns ("this", repeated, and "thee"), the speaker releases the reader's attention only to interest him more deeply in the solution to what now appears as a

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