Sonnet 18- Preserving Beauty Through Poetry

Sonnet 18 fully captivates its audience and exemplifies the poetic genius of William Shakespeare. This poem is fixated on the theme of time preservation. The poem opens up by contrasting a young man’s beauty to summer by saying that he is mild and temperate and not harsh like the summer months. Throughout the poem Shakespeare presents the problems of life by saying that it is temporary and too short. Shakespeare is saying that life, like summer, is temporary, similarly to a short lease of the house. Shakespeare wants to permanently preserve the beauty of the young man by captivating the beauty of him in his poem. Shakespeare eternalizes the young man’s beauty by saying that “so long as men can breathe, or can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee”. William Shakespeare is saying that the young man’s beauty will live on as long as man is alive and able to read about his beauty in his poem.

William Shakespeare creates this eternal theme through the use of literary devices. In the fourth line of the poem Shakespeare uses personification to describe beauty to the shortness of summer. Shakespeare says that “summer’s leases hath all too short a date”, to show that summer is a renter of months who has put down a temporary lease on a home that will soon run out. The lease of the house will run out when death comes in line eleven. “Death brag thou wander’st in his shade” is used as a metaphor for the afterlife. Shakespeare is saying that the lease of the house will run out when summer ends and the shade of the winter months come but the eternal beauty of the young man will live on forever in poetry. The house may not be permanent but the description of the house will live on.

William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 has the common theme of love that many other sonnets share. The Sonnet is a description of the love for a young man’s beauty. The poems theme is similar to other poems because it focuses on preserving love. Other sonnets of this time period also describe love as being permanent through time. Sonnet 18  focuses on preserving love through the permanence of written works. The boy’s actual beauty will fade away when he dies but his true beauty will always be remembered through poetry. Sonnet 18  also different from other poems because it does not describe the dangers of love and the responsibilities of love.