Always use the old sense of the word

The speaker opens the poem with a question addressed to the beloved: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” The next eleven lines are devoted to such a comparison. In line 2, the speaker mentions what mainly differentiates the young woman from a summer’s day: he is “more lovely and more temperate.” Summer’s days tend toward extremes: they are shaken by “rough winds”; in them, the sun (“the eye of heaven”) often shines “too hot,” or too dim. And summer is fleeting: its date is too short, and it leads to the withering of autumn, as “every fair from fair sometime declines.” The ending of the sonnet tells how the beloved differs from the summer in that respect: his beauty will last forever (“Thy eternal summer shall not fade...”) and never die. In the couplet, the speaker explains how the beloved’s beauty will accomplish this feat, and not perish because it is preserved in the poem, which will last forever; it will live “as long as men can breathe or eyes can see.”

On the surface, the poem is simply a statement of praise about the beauty of the beloved; summer tends to unpleasant extremes of windiness and heat, but the beloved is always mild and temperate. Summer is incidentally personified as the “eye of heaven” with its “gold complexion”; the imagery throughout is simple and unaffected, with the “darling buds of May” giving way to the “eternal summer”, which the speaker promises the beloved. The language, too, is comparatively shown through the sonnets; it is not heavy with alliteration or assonance, and nearly every line is its own self-contained clause—almost every line ends with some punctuation, which affects a pause.An important theme of the sonnet is the power of the speaker’s poem to defy time and last forever, carrying the beauty of the beloved down to future generations. The beloved’s “eternal summer” shall not fade precisely because it is embodied in the sonnet: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,” the speaker writes in the couplet, “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

In comparison modern day poetry has more stages of love. Love is not just a mere emotion that should be won, but an action that’s expressed. For example in the poem ‘recitative’ the writer refers to love as an ‘aria’ a simplistic but expressive melody that eventually disappears in a music piece. Recitative is a poem focused on young passionate love, as the speaker mentions their love making is likened to a melody stating that their ‘upstairs neighbours had to keep dropping something down the hall’ due to the loud love noises they were making. A.E Stallings uses poetic techniques such as juxtaposition ‘in arias of love and death’ to show a parallel link between what love is and what love can do. ‘Our nerves were frayed like ravelled sleeves’ is another link between sexual love and the first time of making love. The entire theme of the poem is love, not the love that is experienced after a long period of time, but first time love. Not love that is expressed through appearance but love that is felt. It goes to show just how much love has progressed through the years becoming not just the winning of hearts but the love experienced by two people. Alisha allman