Explore The Different Attitudes Towards Love With Reference to Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” and “Sonnet 116” and Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover”.

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Elizabeth Stephens 11N

Explore The Different Attitudes Towards Love With Reference to Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18" and "Sonnet 116" and Browning's "Porphyria's Lover".

"Sonnet 18", "Shall I Compare Thee", Is written to express love. Shakespeare opens the sonnet with the question, "Shall I compare thee to a summers day?" He then proceeds to do just that. At the beginning of the first quatrain, Shakespeare answers that question by saying that she is "more lovely and more temperate:" than a summers day. The colon after temperate shows that he is about to give us a list of reasons why she is better. This list takes up the second half of the first quatrain and the whole of the second.

Shakespeare complains that the summer can have "rough windes" and doesn't last long enough. He also complains about how the summer is too extreme, varying between too hot and too cold, "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, and often is his gold complexion dim'd". He says that "every faire from faire some-time declines", not through choice, but through chance or "nature's changing course". These are things that he does not like about summer. By comparing his love to summer he may be thought to imply that she may have these faults too but this is corrected in the next quatrain.

After this list of summer's detriments there is a turning point to the sonnet that starts with the word "But". Shakespeare uses the third quatrain to write about how she does not possess summer's failings. Her "eternal summer" will not fade and she will stay beautiful. . Whereas summer is too hot or cold, she does not have emotions that are too extreme. She will defy death who will not be able to "brag thou wander'st in his shade". Here death is personified to emphasize its power but she is more powerful and death will not affect her.

The rhyming couplet at the end of the sonnet is used by Shakespeare to boast about the fact that his opinions of her beauty are correct. He is boasting about how he is such a good writer that he can make her beauty immortal by capturing it in this poem.

All through this poem there is the theme of immortality. This sonnet is aimed at making the subject immortal by capturing her beauty so that it will last forever.
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This sonnet's purpose is to say that unlike summer, which is the most beautiful month of the year but can be extreme, unpredictable and short, Shakespeare's subject is constantly beautiful and that beauty will last forever.

Sonnet 116 is another love sonnet written by Shakespeare with similar themes. This sonnet, like sonnet 18, has a theme of eternity. The difference is that whereas sonnet 18 is about the lover being eternal, sonnet 116 is about love itself being eternal.

Shakespeare starts this sonnet by saying "let me not to the marriage of true minds admit ...

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