![]() ![]() ![]() This reinforces the inferiority of the summer with its changeability but also its brevity (‘sometime’ in Shakespeare’s time meant not only ‘sometimes’, suggesting variability and inconstancy, but also ‘once’ or ‘formerly’, suggesting something that is over). ![]() ![]() There is an easy music to the poem, set up by that opening line: look at repetition of ‘summer’ and ‘some’, which strikes us as natural and not contrived, unlike some of the effects Shakespeare had created in the earlier sonnets: ‘summer’s day’, ‘summer’s lease’, ‘Sometime too hot’, ‘sometime declines’, ‘eternal summer’. In Sonnet 18, right from the confident strut of ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ onwards, Shakespeare is sure that his poetry will guarantee the young man his immortality after all. In the last few sonnets, Shakespeare has begun to introduce the idea that his poetry might provide an alternative ‘immortality’ for the young man, though in those earlier sonnets Shakespeare’s verse has been deemed an inferior way of securing the young man’s immortality when placed next to the idea of leaving offspring. It’s the first poem that doesn’t exhort the Fair Youth to marry and have children: we’ve left the ‘Procreation Sonnets’ behind. Sonnet 18 is a curious poem to analyse when it’s set in the context of the previous sonnets. In his concluding couplet, Shakespeare states that as long as the human race continues to exist, and read poetry, Shakespeare’s poem (‘this’) survives, and continues to ‘give life’ to the young man through keeping his memory alive. ![]()
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