Virginia Byde Pacetti
Mrs. Jernigan
AP English IV
23 February 2011
Poetry Response #5 (I think) of semester 2
William Shakespeare’s sonnet “Shall I Compare Thee to a summer’s Day?” is written as a loving and complementary metaphor. Though it appears that he might be speaking to a lover, he is actually addressing a mentee. Therefore, in this case the structure of a sonnet may have indeed hindered his attempts to convey his feelings. Having such a specific fixed form limits the variability of expression. This means that for meters sake lines such as “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,” relates a false since of sexual longing. And the line, “And often is his gold complexion dimmed,” highlights such physical attraction, yet the line is necessary and stagnate because it must have ten syllables and rhyme with the line at the stanzas end which ends with “untrimmed.” Although one might never realize William Shakespeare was writing about a person at all, if the reader skipped the first line, because the rest of the poem just extends the description of a pleasant summer day, without again drawing reference to the person he wished to immortalize in his work.
“Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day” is a traditional English sonnet. Shakespeare wrote many more of them, so many that they are also referred to as Shakespearian sonnets. The entire poem is in iambic pentameter, and because of that strict regulation, a few of his words are abbreviated to fit the meter. Yet even when he shortened the word owest to “ow’st” to fit the meter, he made sure to rhyme it with a perfect rhyming word “grow’st” in order to obey the rhyme scheme ABABCDCDEFEFGG.
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