The Relationship Between Art and Life in Shakespeare's Sonnet 18
Overview
This essay analyzes Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 to explore the relationship between art and life through the poem's central theme of love and beauty. The student examines how the speaker uses comparison to a summer's day to praise the beloved's superior beauty and explores the implications of artistic representation versus natural reality.
What this essay covers
- Introduction and poem overview focusing on the praise of the beloved's beauty
- Analysis of the summer's day comparison and how it establishes the relationship between art and nature
- Examination of reasons why the beloved surpasses summer in beauty, including physical instability and temporal limitations
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What does William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” tell us about the relationship between art and life?
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 focuses on the theme of love and life. The poem, Sonnet 18, is mainly praise by Shakespeare for his beloved beauty. The speaker introduces the poem with a critical question, asking whether he should compare the lover with summer’s day. Shortly after that, the speaker then flatters his beloved by stating, portraying his qualities as someone who is temperate and lovely. The assertion that speaker makes tells us more about the relationship between art and life in the sense that the beauty of the person being he is addressing is compared to the summer’s day. The temperate and lovely beauty of the beloved compared to the pleasurable feeling of the summer’s day when the sun shines. However, as if being compared to the summer’s day is not flattering enough, the speaker provides numerous reasons as to why he deems the person he is addressing as even much more wonderful and beautiful than a summer’s day. One reasons the speaker thinks make his beloved more striking and attractive is because summer’s day is rarely calm accompanied with rough winds, and summers end too soon.