FAMOUS POEM OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S (SONNET 18)

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S:-

William Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon. The son of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, he was probably educated at the King Edward VI Grammar School in Stratford, where he learned Latin and a little Greek and read the Roman dramatists. At eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, a woman seven or eight years his senior. Together, they raised two daughters: Susanna, who was born in 1583, and Judith (whose twin brother died in boyhood), born in 1585.

Little is known about Shakespeare’s activities between 1585 and 1592. Robert Greene’s A Groatsworth of Wit alludes to him as an actor and playwright. Shakespeare may have taught at school during this period, but it seems more probable that shortly after 1585 he went to London to begin his apprenticeship as an actor. Due to the plague, the London theaters were often closed between June 1592 and April 1594. During that period, Shakespeare probably had some income from his patron, Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, to whom he dedicated his first two poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). The former was a long narrative poem depicting the rejection of Venus by Adonis, his death, and the consequent disappearance of beauty from the world. Despite conservative objections to the poem’s glorification of sensuality, it was immensely popular and was reprinted six times during the nine years following its publication.

In 1594, Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain’s company of actors, the most popular of the companies acting at Court. In 1599, Shakespeare joined a group of Chamberlain’s Men that would form a syndicate to build and operate a new playhouse: the Globe, which became the most famous theater of its time. With his share of the income from the Globe, Shakespeare was able to purchase New Place, his home in Stratford.

While Shakespeare was regarded as the foremost dramatist of his time, evidence indicates that both he and his contemporaries looked to poetry, not playwriting, for enduring fame. Shakespeare’s sonnets were composed between 1593 and 1601, though not published until 1609. That edition, The Sonnets of Shakespeare, consists of 154 sonnets, all written in the form of three quatrains and a couplet that is now recognized as Shakespearean. The sonnets fall into two groups: sonnets 1–126, addressed to a beloved friend, a handsome and noble young man, and sonnets 127–152, to a malignant but fascinating “Dark Lady,” who the poet loves in spite of himself. Nearly all of Shakespeare’s sonnets examine the inevitable decay of time, and the immortalization of beauty and love in poetry.

In his poems and plays, Shakespeare invented thousands of words, often combining or contorting Latin, French, and native roots. His impressive expansion of the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, includes such words as: arch-villain, birthplace, bloodsucking, courtship, dewdrop, downstairs, fanged, heartsore, hunchbacked, leapfrog, misquote, pageantry, radiance, schoolboy, stillborn, watchdog, and zany.

Shakespeare wrote more than thirty plays. These are usually divided into four categories: histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances. His earliest plays were primarily comedies and histories such as Henry VI and The Comedy of Errors, but in 1596, Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, his second tragedy, and over the next dozen years he would return to the form, writing the plays for which he is now best known: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. In his final years, Shakespeare turned to the romantic with Cymbeline, A Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.

Only eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays were published separately in quarto editions during his lifetime; a complete collection of his works did not appear until the publication of the First Folio in 1623, several years after his death. Nonetheless, his contemporaries recognized Shakespeare’s achievements. Francis Meres cited “honey-tongued” Shakespeare for his plays and poems in 1598, and the Chamberlain’s Men rose to become the leading dramatic company in London, installed as members of the royal household in 1603.

Sometime after 1612, Shakespeare retired from the stage and returned to his home in Stratford. He drew up his will in January of 1616, which included his famous bequest to his wife of his “second best bed.” He died on April 23, 1616, and was buried two days later at Stratford Church.

THE MOST FAMOUS POEM OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE:

SONNET18-  SHALL I COMPARE THEE TO A SUMMER’S DAY

  BY WILLIAM 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 often 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 ow’st
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st 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.
     
SUMMARY:

The speaker opens the poem with a question addressed to the beloved: “Shall I compare thee

to a summer’s day?” The next eleven lines are devoted to such a comparison. In line 2, the

speaker stipulates what mainly differentiates the young man from the summer’s day: He is

“more lovely and more temperate.” Summer’s days tend toward extremes: they are shaken by

“rough winds”; in them, the sun (“the eye of heaven”) often shines “too hot,” or too dim. And

summer is fleeting: its date is too short, and it leads to the withering of autumn, as “every fair

from fair sometime declines.” The final quatrain of the sonnet tells how the beloved differs

from the summer in that respect: his beauty will last forever (“Thy eternal summer shall not

fade…”) and never die. In the couplet, the speaker explains how the beloved’s beauty will

accomplish this feat, and not perish because it is preserved in the poem, which will last

forever; it will live “as long as men can breathe or eyes can see.”


COMMENTARY :

This sonnet is certainly the most famous in the sequence of Shakespeare’s sonnets; it may be
the most famous lyric poem in English. Among Shakespeare’s works, only lines such as “To
be or not to be” and “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” are better-known. This is
not to say that it is at all the best or most interesting or most beautiful of the sonnets; but the
simplicity and loveliness of its praise of the beloved has guaranteed its place.

On the surface, the poem is simply a statement of praise about the beauty of the beloved;
summer tends to unpleasant extremes of windiness and heat, but the beloved is always mild
and temperate. Summer is incidentally personified as the “eye of heaven” with its “gold
complexion”; the imagery throughout is simple and unaffected, with the “darling buds of May”
giving way to the “eternal summer”, which the speaker promises the beloved. The language,
too, is comparatively unadorned for the sonnets; it is not heavy with alliteration or assonance,
and nearly every line is its own self-contained clause—almost every line ends with some
punctuation, which effects a pause.

Sonnet 18 is the first poem in the sonnets not to explicitly encourage the young man to have
children. The “procreation” sequence of the first 17 sonnets ended with the speaker’s
realization that the young man might not need children to preserve his beauty; he could also
live, the speaker writes at the end of Sonnet 17, “in my rhyme.” Sonnet 18, then, is the first
“rhyme”—the speaker’s first attempt to preserve the young man’s beauty for all time. An
important theme of the sonnet (as it is an important theme throughout much of the sequence)
is the power of the speaker’s poem to defy time and last forever, carrying the beauty of the
beloved down to future generations. The beloved’s “eternal summer” shall not fade precisely
because it is embodied in the sonnet: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,” the
speaker writes in the couplet, “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

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