Comparing... Sonnet 130 and Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day? by William Shakespeare?

Question

hey, can someone help me compare the two poems... similarites and differences of Sonnet 130 and Shall I Compare Thee to a Summers Day?

-thanks<3

Answer 1

Well the first and most obvious difference between the two is the tone.  In &quot;Shall I...,&quot; Shakespeare speaks of his love gloriously, comparing her to summer.  He says that this comparison falls short because even the most wonderful things about summer can be marred (&quot;Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines&quot;) whereas she is always perfect.  In &quot;Sonnet 130,&quot; Shakespeare provides a very realistic perception of the woman.  He explains her faults flat-out (&quot;And in some perfumes is there more delight / Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks&quot;).

The two poems both speak of eternal, unbreakable love.  In &quot;Shall I...,&quot; he is in love with the woman&#039;s perfection and her all-around goddess-ness.  In &quot;Sonnet 130,&quot; he is in love with her humanity.  Although she may not appear perfect, she is nevertheless perfect to him.

Both poems are also in the Shakespearean sonnet form.  The first three parts are each four lines long, and are known as quatrains, rhymed ABAB; the fourth part is called the couplet, and is rhymed CC.  They are also written in iambic pentameter.  You will also notice that the quatrains both describe the actual woman.  The couplets both describe his love for them.

Answer 2

Look at the Commentaries and you should be able to compare them:

SONNET 130

My mistress&#039; eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips&#039; red;

If snow be white, why then her b*****s are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask&#039;d, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

SONNET 130 - COMMENTARY

Sonnet 130 is the poet&#039;s pragmatic tribute to his uncomely mistress, commonly referred to as the dark lady because of her dun complexion. The dark lady, who ultimately betrays the poet, appears in sonnets 127 to 154.

Sonnet 130 is clearly a parody of the conventional love sonnet, made popular by Petrarch and, in particular, made popular in England by Sidney&#039;s use of the Petrarchan form in his epic poem Astrophel and Stella.

If you compare the stanzas of Astrophel and Stella to Sonnet 130, you will see exactly what elements of the conventional love sonnet Shakespeare is light-heartedly mocking. In Sonnet 130, there is no use of grandiose metaphor or allusion; he does not compare his love to Venus, there is no evocation to Morpheus, etc. The ordinary beauty and humanity of his lover are important to Shakespeare in this sonnet, and he deliberately uses typical love poetry metaphors against themselves. In Sidney&#039;s work, for example, the features of the poet&#039;s lover are as beautiful and, at times, more beautiful than the finest pearls, diamonds, rubies, and silk. In Sonnet 130, the references to such objects of perfection are indeed present, but they are there to illustrate that his lover is not as beautiful -- a total rejection of Petrarch form and content. Shakespeare utilizes a new structure, through which the straightforward theme of his lover’s simplicity can be developed in the three quatrains and neatly concluded in the final couplet.

Thus, Shakespeare is using all the techniques available, including the sonnet structure itself, to enhance his parody of the traditional Petrarchan sonnet typified by Sidney’s work. But Shakespeare ends the sonnet by proclaiming his love for his mistress despite her lack of adornment, so he does finally embrace the fundamental theme in Petrarch&#039;s sonnets: total and consuming love.

One final note: Shakespeare&#039;s reference to hair as &#039;wires&#039; confuses modern readers because we assume it to mean our current definition of wire, i.e., a thread of metal, which is hardly a fitting word in the context of the poem. However, to a Renaissance reader, wire would refer to the finely-spun gold threads woven into fancy hair nets. Many poets of the time used this term as a benchmark of beauty, including Spenser:

Some angel she had been,

Her long loose yellow locks like golden wire,

Sprinkled with pearl, and pearling flowers atween,

Do like a golden mantle her attire,

And being crowned with a garland green.

(Epithal).

**

Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer&#039;s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer&#039;s lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm&#039;d;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature&#039;s changing course untrimm&#039;d;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander&#039;st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Summary

The speaker opens the poem with a question addressed to the beloved: &quot;Shall I compare thee to a summer&#039;s day?&quot; The next eleven lines are devoted to such a comparison. In line 2, the speaker stipulates what mainly differentiates the young man from the summer&#039;s day: he is &quot;more lovely and more temperate.&quot; Summer&#039;s days tend toward extremes: they are shaken by &quot;rough winds&quot;; in them, the sun (&quot;the eye of heaven&quot;) often shines &quot;too hot,&quot; or too dim. And summer is fleeting: its date is too short, and it leads to the withering of autumn, as &quot;every fair from fair sometime declines.&quot; The final quatrain of the sonnet tells how the beloved differs from the summer in that respect: his beauty will last forever (&quot;Thy eternal summer shall not fade...&quot;) and never die. In the couplet, the speaker explains how the beloved&#039;s beauty will accomplish this feat, and not perish because it is preserved in the poem, which will last forever; it will live &quot;as long as men can breathe or eyes can see.&quot;

Commentary

This sonnet is certainly the most famous in the sequence of Shakespeare&#039;s sonnets; it may be the most famous lyric poem in English. Among Shakespeare&#039;s works, only lines such as &quot;To be or not to be&quot; and &quot;Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?&quot; are better-known. This is not to say that it is at all the best or most interesting or most beautiful of the sonnets; but the simplicity and loveliness of its praise of the beloved has guaranteed its place.

On the surface, the poem is simply a statement of praise about the beauty of the beloved; summer tends to unpleasant extremes of windiness and heat, but the beloved is always mild and temperate. Summer is incidentally personified as the &quot;eye of heaven&quot; with its &quot;gold complexion&quot;; the imagery throughout is simple and unaffected, with the &quot;darling buds of May&quot; giving way to the &quot;eternal summer&quot;, which the speaker promises the beloved. The language, too, is comparatively unadorned for the sonnets; it is not heavy with alliteration or assonance, and nearly every line is its own self-contained clause--almost every line ends with some punctuation, which effects a pause.

Sonnet 18 is the first poem in the sonnets not to explicitly encourage the young man to have children. The &quot;procreation&quot; sequence of the first 17 sonnets ended with the speaker&#039;s realization that the young man might not need children to preserve his beauty; he could also live, the speaker writes at the end of Sonnet 17, &quot;in my rhyme.&quot; Sonnet 18, then, is the first &quot;rhyme&quot;--the speaker&#039;s first attempt to preserve the young man&#039;s beauty for all time. An important theme of the sonnet (as it is an important theme throughout much of the sequence) is the power of the speaker&#039;s poem to defy time and last forever, carrying the beauty of the beloved down to future generations. The beloved&#039;s &quot;eternal summer&quot; shall not fade precisely because it is embodied in the sonnet: &quot;So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,&quot; the speaker writes in the couplet, &quot;So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.&quot;