Since I had some problems with my pc, as I told you at school last week, I couldn't send my homework to the website. The issues now are gone so here there is my work about "the Sonnet" and "Shall I compare" by Shakespeare. 

”Shall I Compare”

“Shall I compare” is William Shakespeare’s eighteenth sonnet. We can understand that is a sonnet because there are 14 lines structured in three quatrains and a sestet. In the first three quatrains, as every other Shakespearean sonnet, the poet pose the problem in three different aspects. On the other hand in this case Shakespeare doesn’t present express the problem before the third quatrain.

In the first quatrain the poet makes a comparison between somebody and the sun. We understand that Shakespeare wants to make us understand that the young person is better than a summer day in every little detail. As a matter of fact he describes every negative aspect of the summer for example that the winds are too strong exc. In the second quatrain the poet keep on telling us about the imperfections of summer days saying that the weather is too hot exc.

In the third quatrain the young person becomes the subject of the sonnet. The poets says that with this sonnet he will be eternal. As a consequence we understands that the problem was how to avoid the death and how to make people immortal. Nobody knows who is the young person whom Shakespeare talks about, we just know that the initials of his name are W.H.

The sonnet

The sonnet is a lyrical form of poetry which aim is to tell a story and to foster reflections. It’s about private feelings and emotions. The sonnet originated in Italy in XIV. The best known Italian sonneteers were Dante and Petrarch but just the second proved essential to the birth of the English sonnet. This kind of lyrical form, as the Renaissance, entered England one century later than in the Continent. Thomas Wyatt, an English sonneteer, tried to translate the Italian verses into English but with no success. As a matter of fact there was the problem of rhythm. In Italian language rhythm depends on the number of syllables in the words, on the other hand rhythm in English language depends on the alternation of stress and unstressed syllables. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey created a new structure of the sonnet later called “Elizabethan sonnet” or “Shakespearean sonnet”. In this case the text is arranged into three quatrains in which it is posed the problem in three different aspects and a final rhyming couplet in which the poet tries to solve it. This kind of structure is different from the Petrarch one that was organized into a octave and a sestet. In the first part the poet wrote the problem and in the second he wanted to solve it. Both sonnets have 14 lines.