English 1 Honors
Mr. Indelicato
Name _________________________________
Date _____________________ Period ____
Sonnet 18
By William Shakespeare
1
5
10
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 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.
1 a summer’s day: i.e. the summer season
2 temperate: of even temperature
4 lease: allotted time. date: duration
7 fair…fair: beautiful thing…beauty
8 untrimm’d: divested of beauty
10 ow’st: ownest
12 to…grow’st: you become inseparably engrafted upon time.
Notes on the Conventions of a Sonnet:
1. What is a sonnet?
2. What is a Shakespearean Sonnet (a.k.a. English Sonnet)?
a. Structure:
b. Rhyme scheme:
c. Tone:
3. What is a heroic couplet?
Paraphrase:
Analysis of Sonnet 18:
1. Go back and paraphrase Sonnet 18 in the space to the right of the sonnet.
2. What do you think Sonnet 18 is about? (Hint: look at each quatrain and the couplet.)

Who is the narrator, the “I”?

Who is the “you” referring to in the sonnet?

What problems do the quatrains expose?

What solution does the heroic couplet suggest?
3. What figurative language does Shakespeare use? What effect does each evoke?
Device
Passage
Effect/Interpretation
metaphor
personification
personification
4. What is Shakespeare’s message in this sonnet, his theme? State it in a single sentence.
Use this sentence frame to help you form your theme statement: In Sonnet 18,
Shakespeare uses details such as ______ to reveal a theme that ___________.