Sonnet 18

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 dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest 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.

The sonnet belongs to Shakespeare’s collection, it belongs to the section “the marriage sonnet”.

The structure of the sonnet consists of three consists of three quatrains and a rhyming couplet.  

The reader don’t know who the speaking voice refers to. He refers to him with “thee”.

In the first line there is a rhetoric question. The speaking voice already knows the answer. All the sonnet is an explanation of the reason why it is a rhetoric question.

The comparison with “a summer’s day” is not suitable. Even if the summer’s day is generally associated with positive qualities is not enough to express the great values of the interlocutor. Immediately in the second line the speaking voice express why the compare reduces those qualities,

Because the interlocutor is more lovely and more temperate.

The grammatical device exploited by the speaking voice to praise his interlocutor and plays him an a higher degree is the use of majority comparative.

In addition, the use of anaphoric syntax reinforces the idea of the superior qualities of the “Fear Youth” since through the repetition of sound. It creates a clear idea into the reader’s mind that it will develop along the all sonnet.

The poet’s intention is to convince the “Fear Youth” to get marriage and children so beauty could be generated.

The poet develops the semantic field of nature to magnify.

The recurrent sound “d” brings forth negative qualities that it attributes to nature but he wants to associate to his lover.

The resolution of the problem is expressed in the rhyming couplet.