FREE ESSAY ON WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Amazing authors can induce thoughts by a single word. The ideas that can form in our heads
by a small phrase are powerful. Only the most talented and capable authors can provoke
such feelings within us. Who is more than able to stir these feelings in a reader but
William Shakespeare? His various plays keep us entranced and curious but it is his poetry
that strikes a chord deep within us. Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare is particularly
powerful. He writes about a love that cannot be compared to anything in the world because
of his deep infatuation.
Shakespeare wrote his sonnet when he was deeply in love with a woman. He starts off his
sonnet by implanting an image in our head of a summer day. A summer day triggers a scene
that flashes in our head of children playing and the sun shining, basically a carefree
day where everything is beautiful. He contemplates whether or not to compare his love to
this ideal day, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" but decides against it in his
second line because he feels his love is "more lovely and more temperate" that this day.
He then proceeds to bombard us with images of natural nuisances such as windy days that
"…shake the darling buds of May," hot weather magnified because it is coming from
heaven, and changing seasons. Shakespeare has taken the idea of a warm breezy summer day
and twisted it into a sweltering day with the sun beating down on us.
However, in the lines after the destruction of a nice day, he makes us smile by the
comments he showers on his love. He tells us that his love's beauty shall remain the same
at all times. "…thy…shall not fade." He places an exclamation on that line by
using the word eternal. It gives us the feeling that her beauty is one that will last
until the end of the earth. Shakespeare then goes on to speak about how exquisite she is.
She is different from everyone because she will always have what she has now unlike
others that will lose it. Even if death looms before her he has to right or reason to
"brag." She will not pale in his shadow. Shakespeare capitalizes Death and personifies
him and gives us an image of a grim reaper type character. 
In Shakespeare's ending couplet, he states that no matter what, as long as people are
still living and literate, they will read his sonnet. As long as his sonnet is read she
will stay alive. His sonnet will "give life to thee." Shakespeare is immortalizing his
love and placing her on a pedestal.
The scenes that Shakespeare throws at us give us ideas of beauty and disappointment. He
takes us from a place of pleasure to one of distaste. He makes us go in one direction
then turns us around and causes us to go in a three hundred sixty-degree turn. The ride
we are taken on is an enjoyable one that makes the sonnet unforgettable which is only
done through the explicit images that allow our own ideas to form.