Critical Appreciation Of Sonnet 18

William Shakespeare was arguably the greatest poet of all time, let alone of the renaissance period, and he certainly knew how brilliantly clever he was. Shakespeare wrote many sonnets which ultimately were callous towards their subjects. In addition to them being callous he also expertly used the final couplet to make him seem like he was a great poet whose writing was sheer awesome in the truest sense of the term, or to brag on his abilities in any way. Many, many of his sonnets show evidence of this trait. One example of this is Sonnet 18. However, sonnets 130, 116, and 65 also show evidence of this, among others. Shakespeare manages to degrade his love, summer, love in general, his love again and even beauty, all the while praising himself

Sometimes he is rather discrete about it. In Sonnet 18, for example, Shakespeare begins by comparing his love to a summer’s day, quickly coming to the conclusion that she is, in fact, far greater than a summer’s day. He begins this sonnet with the well known question “shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”, and then comes right back with the answer “thou art more lovely and more temperate” (lines 1-2). However, though it seems that this is a beautiful and complimentary sonnet of love, the reality is soon evident – he does not believe that a day in the summertime is that great to begin with. The next six lines of the poem explain just that. Shakespeare uses many examples of qualities that are less than lovely, and are dislikable about the summertime. He claims that summer can be too windy, too short, too hot, and that is it not always all that it could be (3-8). Shakespeare appears to be writing a love sonnet but it seems as if he does not consider the girl to which he is writing to all that wonderful. If he says that she is more lovely than summer, yet does not particularly enjoy summer, what are we led to believe that he thinks of

This time he is bragging about his ability to love, not necessarily his ability to write. After all that he has said about his mistress he concludes “and yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / as any she belied with false compare” (13-14). This is a declaration of how great at loving he is by showing his readers that after all of the nasty things that he previously said about his girl he is awesome, special, and rare, since he can still love her despite her many flaws. He, however, is quite clever and does so in a way that could be interpreted as him saying his girl is rare, and real and that she does not need false comparisons to make her special, but rather that her true reality is her beauty. Even though there are two possible meanings in this final couplet the first meaning is more emphasized based on the way that Shakespeare tends to write his sonnets. These sneaky double meanings present in his final couplets are a huge part of what makes him so clever as a