Sonnet 18 - William Shakespeare Analysis
...life? In William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18,” Shakespeare argues that love is everlasting and will never fade away like a summer’s day. The beauty of a summer’s day disappears with a change of a season, but the beauty of love will never change. Shakespeare purposely chose nature to compare with love because nature is a beautiful creation by God. Yet, Shakespeare challenges the beauty of God’s creation with the beauty of love shared between two people. Shakespeare uses a wide range of techniques such as, personification, imagery, metaphor and sound to demonstrate how the beauty of nature would die in time but love would live on forever in his poem.XXX
Shakespeare uses personification in order to emphasize on his theme and make his comparisons more vibrant and alive to the audience. “Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines” (line 5). Instead of saying, “sometime too hot the sun shines,” Shakespeare replaces “sun” with a personification. He uses personification here to emphasize on his theme that sometimes a summer’s day would get too hot and intolerable but love would always be reasonable. He chose to use personification because he knows that at some point in life there are days where the heat is utterly unbearable. Shakespeare hopes that when the audience reads this line, they would be able to make a connection to their lives. Not only does Shakespeare compare love to day, he also compares love to darkness. “Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade” (line 11). In this line, Shakespeare personifies death, giving it a human characteristic of bragging. He chose to give death the human characteristic of bragging because he knows that death has a right to brag about its power to take away a life. However, Shakespeare states that even though death has the power to take away a life, it does not have the power to end love. Shakespeare believes that love is...
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