Exam Prep: Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare - How to Best Write an Essay
Subject: IGCSE English Literature (0475)
Hi! Let's begin. You can find the full poem for reference in the Poetry Foundation website by clicking here. Open a tab or keep the poem in mind while reading this post.
Something you should know about Sonnets:
Before getting into the analysis of the poem, it's good to understand a few traditional ideas about sonnets.
- The sonnet form originated in medieval Italy with poets like Giacomo de Lentini, and became popular during the Renaissance.
- Renaissance sonnets usually focus on an idealised and beloved person, whose beauty was exaggerated through comparisons to nature or portrayed as something timeless or precious.
- This tradition was heavily influenced by the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca. His love poetry shaped what later became known as the Petrarchan sonnet tradition.
- Petrachan sonnet traditions usually showed a male speaker admiring a woman. All of this gets important as you keep reading.
Something you should know about Sonnet 18:
Sonnet 18 follows most of these Renaissance sonnet conventions since it compares the beauty of the person to nature's timelessness. However, keep in mind:
- Shakespeare wrote a collection of 154 sonnet, which was divided by critics into three thematic sections. Sonnet 18 is taken from the first section of this collection.
- Sonnet 18 belongs to the "Fair Youth" sequence (generally Sonnets 1-126), and this first section of his collection expresses devotion and admiration towards an anonymous young man, and not to an idealised female beloved.
This was a bit unusual and even controversial in the largely Petrarchan circles of Renaissance poetry that people used to read during Shakespeare's time. Interestingly, if we remove our knowledge of this context, the poem sounds just like a poem addressing a woman. In other words, the poem is an intimate expression of admiration and devotion that the speaker feels for their beloved. The gender of the person it is written for does not take away from it in any manner, and Shakespeare may have used this as leverage without filtering down his message.
Interconnected Themes: Time, Nature, and Poetry
One useful way to structure your essay is to focus on how Shakespeare's speaker compares his beloved to nature.
Summer is a hot and fertile season that is usually associated with warmth, passion, beauty, and romance. This makes summer an appropriate comparison for youth and attractiveness. At the same time, Shakespeare focuses on how summer is temporary, and how youth in its prime only lasts for a short time. Seasons change, and beauty and youth fade.
So, the poem then contrasts the temporary beauty found in nature with the lasting power of poetry. Shakespeare writes:
"So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."
"This" refers to the sonnet, of course. As long as the sonnet lives, their beauty lives.
In this sense, poetry and art become ways of resisting time by preserving our emotions, or our beauty and memory. Do you think a sonnet written for you will last generations, if not more? The speaker indirectly tells us: youth and summer will fade, but he can give the person he loves a gift by writing this sonnet, which has the ability to immortalise this person in ways that life will not.
When we look at literature like this, it becomes a celebration of beauty and love. It lets us look at poetry as something we document very seriously, for reasons like preserving human beauty against time and death, or just as an attempt to preserve something we fear we may lose in the future. Do you feel it has that ability, considering we are still reading this sonnet?
Other Poems in this Collection
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Sweety Isaac
Sweety Isaac