Sonnet 18

The sonnet hasn’t any specific title, but it has just a number near to the noun ”sonnet”, that is 18: it means that this poem belongs to a collection of poems, called marriage sonnets; a part of this collection is dedicated to the Fair Young and the other part is dedicated to the Dark Lady Sonnet, that was the parody of the medieval angel woman.

All this collection follows the Elizabethian model: the sonnets that belongs to this model are organized into three quatrains and a Iambic pentameter at the end.

The first stanza begins with a rethorical question, where the poet asks to the Fair Young if he can compare the addressed to a summer day then Shakespeare compares his lover to a summer day because he defines the lover more lovely and temperate than a summer day, because sometimes the summer days are very hot.

In the second stanza the poet wants to express nature’s contemporaneity because while the sun shines, that is called using a metaphor (“eye of heaven”), every fair changes and declines.

In the third stanza the poet says that everything changes and the only think that resists is his love to his lover and nor time and death and neither the end of the world will divide them.

The sonnet’s moral is that love that Shakespeare feels for the Fair Young is the only thing that will live forever because it has been written and the sonnets will live forever because they are printed on paper will stay forever because there would always be someone that will read them.