“Sonnet 18” of Shakespeare belongs to the group of poems addressed by the author to Pure Youth, the embodiment of the beauty of features, the clarity of the soul of a young man. The addressee of this poem is the very embodiment of youth and beauty, the combination of which constitutes the theme of the sonnet. From here the poet draws on a grandiose set of philosophical images of the seasons and natural phenomena. Youth for Shakespeare is something as majestic as a natural phenomenon and something with the same deep philosophical significance. In this poem, the author uses bright and vivid natural imagery. Through comparing a person with a natural phenomenon, he makes an attempt at a detailed praise for the beauty of youth, which overcomes aging and even death.
The poem analyzed in this work is a classic example of the traditional form of poetic expression that dominated the literature of the late Renaissance. The sonnet form of the poem, in this case, obviously works in interaction with the thought that the poet consistently conveys (Quackenbush et al. 234). His great mastery of form and diction gives a special dynamic to the reasoning presented in the poem. The specificity of a sonnet as a special poetic form is often considered to be a witty statement of an idea or a detailed compliment (Runsdorf 235). The stylistic feature of the sonnet, expressed through diction, imagery and range of themes, is the striving for a logical conclusion and the most artistic and clear expression of thought. This poem contains at the heart of its composition a rhetorical turn, ingeniously giving comparison in an unexpected and unobtrusive way (Moll 139). Having suggested a comparison of the beauty of a young man with a summer day, Shakespeare unfolds this reasoning, placing human beauty higher than natural, as more charming and at the same time modest.
Youth in this sonnet is extensively compared with summer time. However, nature, like everything earthly, is doomed to decay, since the laws of nature doom absolutely everything to change. Thus, towards its middle, the sonnet passes to the rhetorical phase of doubt, a melancholic experience associated with a presentiment of finitude. However, the beauty described by Shakespeare also has a certain eternal quality that distinguishes it from nature. Shakespeare refers to Youth as a specific philosophical category of being. Changing youth ceases to be itself and is transformed into something else. But the beauty of Eternal Youth can never fade because it is constant and enduring.
Consequently, the third quatrain of this sonnet produces a kind of transformation of the sad conclusions from the previous semantic passage (Shakespeare 25). The beauty of youth for Shakespeare turns out to be eternal because it has a certain quality that surpasses time itself and the frailty of being. Beauty is even able to overcome death, which may be subject to the human body, youth, but not Eternal Beauty as a kind of idea that can withstand the test of time.
Beauty, as the last two lines of the sonnet emphasize, is in the eye of the beholder. Therefore, in Shakespeare’s poem, as long as people are alive and as long as they are given the gift of sight, that is, the possibility of aesthetic evaluation, beauty remains eternal and unquenchable. This sonnet as a whole expresses a deep understanding of beauty and at the same time contains a desire and a call to people to be able to find and appreciate it.
Works Cited
Moll, Richard J. “A new look at an old reading: William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18”. The Explicator, 2017, vol. 75, no. 2, pp.137-139.
Quackenbush, Karen C., et al. “Stylistics analysis of Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare”. International Journal of Applied Research, 2019, vol. 5, no. 5, pp. 233-237.
Runsdorf, James H. “Shall I compare thee? Sonnet 18 and Robert Greene’s Menaphon”. Notes and Queries, 2020, vol. 67, no. 2, pp. 234–237.
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Folger Shakespeare Library, 2004.