Poetry Response 4

Callie Huseman
Jernigan
English 4 AP
23 February 2011
Poetry Response
“Shall I Compare Thee To a Summer’s Day”

This poem is written by Shakespeare. The obvious answer would be to say that this is a Shakespearian sonnet, as that is the rhyme scheme that it follows. Each of these sections focuses on a different idea of the poem as a whole. The rhyme scheme follows ABAB-CDCD-EFEF-GG
The first four lines set up the comparison between the girl and the summer day. Shakespeare then goes on to say that summer is too short and the rough winds often shake the May flowers. These lines are used to show the comparison between the two, but also so that Shakespeare can say that she, the girl, is more constant that the summer. He writes “Thou are more lovely and more temperate” which means that he thinks that she will last longer than the quickly passing and changing summer day.
The second quatrain describes the different ways that the summer day can end or go wrong. It can be too hot or the sun can be hidden behind the clouds. Shakespeare, in this quatrain, includes the main idea in the third line. He writes “ And every fair from fair sometime declines.” This means that eventually, everything loses its beauty.
The third quatrain is where Shakespeare begins to shift his focus back to the girl that he is writing about. He says that her youth will not fade and she will always be beautiful. He even goes as far to say that she will never die, by saying “Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade.”
The last two lines, the couplet, is where Shakespeare makes his main point. He says that the poem will allow the girl to live on forever. He does not mean this literally, but in the sense that she will always be remembered because of this poem that he wrote about her.
Shakespeare split up the poem in this way because it allowed him to give each section of the poem a different meaning. He was able to focus the attention on to the last two lines, the couplet, to show his main idea in the poem as a whole.