Good Morning/ Good Afternoon teacher and my fellow class mates. Today I will be talking to you about 'Shall I Compare Thee' by William Shakespeare. 'Shall I Compare Thee' is about love and what two lovers feel for each other and how it is not affected by age. The way that Shakespeare is describing the woman is that she will never grow old and that her beauty will live on forever just like the poem will.
'Shall I Compare Thee’ was published in 1609 but was written many years before. This was just before Shakespeare’s death in 1616. It is Sonnet 18 and comes after the procreation series of sonnets. It expresses love as it matures. This poem was written during the Elizabethan era which was a time of the expansion of literature, discovery and exploration and technological advances. This characterises the poem because of the influences that the hierarchy and discovery of new worlds had. The impact that this had on the poem is that it allowed more freedom in the way writers expressed themselves.
The type of love that was being explored is romantic love. This is expressed through the use of a variety of techniques such as repetition, apostrophe, alliteration, personification, imagery, rhetorical question and 1st person. One example is 'Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May’. The imagery used creates a metaphorical reference to the woman's beauty. The love that is being expressed is in the middle of the love cycle and it gives us a sense of what the poet felt for the woman. The idea of love that Shakespeare wanted to also express was everlasting love. He wanted to convey that love lasts forever if you love someone that much. This is conveyed when the poet says 'eternal summer' and 'eternal lines'. The repetition of 'eternal' reinforces the idea that the woman, and her beauty, will be immortal and last forever.
The characters have been used to create a sense of love and also beauty that has been expressed