1/9/2024 0 Comments Scansion of sonnet 18We cannot be sure who arranged the sonnets into the order in which they were printed in 1609 (in the first full printing of the poems, featuring that enigmatic dedication to ‘Mr W. This is significant, following Booth, if we wish to analysis Sonnet 18 (or ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ if you’d prefer) in the context of the preceding sonnets, which had been concerned with procreation. It’s worth bearing in mind that Shakespeare had referred to these lines of life in Sonnet 16. So, as Booth points out, ‘eternal lines’ are threads that are never cut. a long thread would mean a long life, and a short thread would mean you’d be cut down in your prime. Everyone’s life span was decided by the Fates, who cut a thread of corresponding length, i.e. However, as Booth notes, this is probably also an allusion to the lines of life, the threads spun by the Fates in classical mythology. In such an analysis, then, ‘eternal lines’ prefigure Shakespeare’s own immortal lines of poetry, designed to give immortality to the poem’s addressee, the Fair Youth. ‘When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st’: it’s worth observing the suggestion of self-referentiality here, with ‘lines’ summoning the lines of Shakespeare’s verse. As Stephen Booth points out in the detailed notes to this sonnet in his indispensable edition Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Yale Nota Bene), the brightness of that all-too-fleeting summer’s day has been declining ever since the poem’s opening line: ‘dimmed’, ‘declines’, ‘fade’, ‘shade’. In terms of imagery, the reference to Death bragging ‘thou wander’st in his shade’, as well as calling up the words from the 23rd Psalm (‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death’), also fits neatly into the poem’s broader use of summer/sun imagery. 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’.
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