In the sonnet, Barrett Browning repeats “I love thee” over and over again rather than using different words for love. This is to enforce the already existing knowledge about the strength of her love, and that what she feels is love, nothing more and nothing less.

The poem’s speaker is a woman talking to her beloved. She isn’t carried gushingly away by her love for the person she addresses, or by the thought of his love for her.

Answer Expert Verified The central problem expressed through the speaker’s use of negative words and phrases in Petrarch’s sonnet 18 is: He cannot capture his beloved’s beauty in verse. In the first 8 lines. Petrarch is describing all the aspects that he adores about his lady and how her beauty is capturing him.

“I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought” – he grieves for not having fulfilled the wishes and desires of his youth, that has obviously passed. Many of his friends are now dead. But the thought of his “dear friend” changes his attitude by giving him a new sense of fulfilment, that he has otherwise forgotten.

What does “drown an eye” mean? To cry. 3b. Which thoughts cause the speaker to “drown an eye” and why? His friends have passed on and he has lost many things he had seen and love and remembers his past regrets.

Lines 7-8 present the volta, or turn in thought. That is, the speaker says that everything is nature changes and declines: “… every fair from fair sometime declines.” Thus, any kind of beauty deteriorates; it cannot remain the same.

The biggest problem with summer, however, is its fleeting nature; like all seasons, it will pass more or less soon, and the speaker does not wish his beloved’s beauty to fade. His solution is stating that just as his beloved is “more lovely”, his beauty will outlive summer thanks to the poet’s verses.

Shakespeare uses Sonnet 18 to praise his beloved’s beauty and describe all the ways in which their beauty is preferable to a summer day. The stability of love and its power to immortalize someone is the overarching theme of this poem.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 comes close to being an extended simile, without ever quite being one. A poem which said “You are like a summer’s day, in the following ways” would clearly be a simile on the same expansive scale as Homer’s comparisons.

Sonnet 18 is a typical English or Shakespearean sonnet, having 14 lines of iambic pentameter: three quatrains followed by a couplet. It also has the characteristic rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this and this gives life to thee. It is in a metaphoric sense that his beloved will never die. Human bodies are subject to death and decay whereas lines (poetry) can live forever as long as humans are able to read or listen to them.

line 3

Line 3 – Personification “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May” is a personification where the act of shaking is done by “Rough winds”, so a human action is referred to a without life thing.

Personification plays a very important part in the development of this famous sonnet in the way that it allows the speaker to personify both the sun and death as he develops his argument as to why comparing his beloved to a “summer’s day” would actually be a very inadequate and inaccurate comparison to make.

Hyperbole. The use of the word ‘eternal’ is an exaggeration. People do not live forever, and his beloved’s beauty or love will eventually fade and die.

Referring either to the sun, identified as the “eye,” or to heaven itself, the speaker uses personification when he uses the possessive “his” and speaks of a “complexion.” Further, in the final line, the speaker refers to the poem, saying, “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” (line 14).

Literary devices used in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?,” include extended metaphor, personification, and rhetorical questions.