William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18”, enhances the essence of beauty higher than that of nature, making nature’s seemingly flawless character appear dull compared to his lover. Through means of form, imagery, and figurative language, Shakespeare constantly expresses how his unnamed lover possesses immortal beauty that far transcends the splendor of a summer’s day. In the first quatrain, Shakespeare begins by comparing his beloved to nature itself, but soon after, he instead offers reasons as to why the comparison is not deserving. Beginning with the example, “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,” (Shakespeare 3) Shakespeare begins to unveil all the imperfections that summer possesses in order to further distance the beauty of his beloved from nature. During the month of May, the beginning of summer has commenced and the weather gradually begins to get warm as well as flower starting to fully blossom. However, instead of professing the positive characteristics of summer, Shakespeare openly condemns nature by implying that “rough winds” blow away all the petals of the beautiful …show more content…
By Shakespeare saying that the sun is “sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, and often is his gold complexion dimmed,” (Shakespeare 5-6) he points out that the sun varies in shining too much some days and too hot other days. By stressing on the phrase “dimmed complexion”, the poet is yet again deemphasizing all positive thoughts of summer in order to show how his lover outweighs nature’s opposing imperfect trait. Through the use of personification, Shakespeare compares the sun as hot while his lover is represented as temperate. Shakespeare’s stress on the word “complexion” refers to something of human-likeness so that nature can be represented as