Shakespeare Sonnet 18

Sonnet 18 is a wonderfully written sonnet full of imagery and metaphors. In the sonnet, Shakespeare compares a woman to a summer's day in order to articulate her beauty. In doing so, he holds her up to an impossibly high standard that no woman could ever actually live up to. This represents the passion of love and how it makes people see their lovers in a light that cannot be obtained in the real world. Sonnet 18 focuses on the themes of the stability of love and its power to immortalize. The sonnet starts by praising the woman and slowly builds her into the image of a perfect being. At the third quatrain, the sonnet shifts and the woman is summer. By doing this, Shakespeare showed that she has transformed into the standard by which true beauty can and should be judged. Shakespeare then expresses his longing for the woman to be forever in human memory, and he tries to accomplish this through this sonnet. He believes this sonnet will embody the woman and it will carry on her image long after she's gone.
   In my research of this sonnet, I found that the poem is less about the subject of the poem and more about the poem itself. Shakespeare is actually proclaiming that the poem will last forever, making it more about his own skill than about the subject of the poem. He personifies various things like Summer, the Sun, Nature, and Death. Death is a rival for the poets love and also a rival of the poems longevity. The use of metaphors is prevalent throughout with almost every line containing a metaphor.