help on shakesperian sonnet plz. i just need some more explanations!?

Question

Sonnet XVIII
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
The 154 sonnets Shakespeare wrote exemplify his talent for compressed writing and depth of thought. Generally thought to be (at least to some degree) autobiographical, many are in the nature of apostrophic generalities; a large number are addressed to a man, others to a "dark lady." The identity of these persons addressed has generated considerable conjecture and a torrent of controversy .
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest,
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see

Answer 1

Here's a line-by-line retelling of it in modern English, with some notes of explanation at the end.

Shall I compare you to a summer's day?
You are more lovely and more moderate
Rough winds shake the delicate buds that form in May,
and summer's time is too short:
Sometimes the sun, the eye of heaven, shines too hot,
and often his golden face is dimmed;
every young person loses his or her youth from age.
By chance/luck or nature's changing course unimpeded;
but the summer of your eternal youth will never fade,
and you'll never lose possession of your beauty that you own,
and you can even waltz near Death and brag that you got away,
because here in this poem you are eternally young and beautiful,
so long as men can breathe, or eyes can see.

I gather your question got tucked into the middle of the sonnet. Shakespeare uses a conceit, which is defined by the Thrall/Hibbard/Holman handbook to literature as the following:

"Originally the term was almost synonymous with 'idea' or 'conception' and implied something made or conceived in the mind. Its later specialized uses in describing a type of poetic meaphor still retain the essential sense of the original meaning, in that _conceit_ still implies intellectual ingenuity whether applied to the Petrarchan conventions of the Elizabethan Period or the elaborate and witty analogies of the writes of metaphysical verse.

"The term is used to designate an ingenious and fanciful notion or conception, usually expressed through an elaborate analogy, and pointing to a striking parallel between two seemingly dissimilar things. A _conceit_ may be a brief metaphor but it usually forms the framework of an entire poem. In English there are two basic kinds of _conceits_: the Petrarchan conceit, most often found in love poems and sonnets, which the subject of the poem is compared extensively and elaborately to some object, a rose, a ship, a garden, etc., and the metaphysical conceit, in which complex, startling and highly intellectual analogies are made." (THH)

So because Petrarch, an ancient Greek, originally wrote love sonnets to Laura, this poem by Shakespeare is Petrarchan. It compares a woman to a summer's day, and extols her beauty, her fair skin and her youth.

I don't quite get what you're being asked to do, but I'd say that you need to do a thorough line-by-line reading and decompress the Bard's lines and explicate them, and go into depth about word choice, symbolism, and depth of feeling.

Hope this helps. Cheers, K

Answer 2

Shakespeare`s `dark female` replaced into Mary Fitton and he or she lived at Gawsworth corridor in Cheshire. I as quickly as went on a guided excursion there the place they looked as though it would nicely known a lot approximately her. propose you touch Gawsworth???

Answer 3

I'm not sure what kind of explanations you're asking for.

Try http://www.shakespeare.com

Answer 4

You might want to try www.sparknotes.com or www.online-literature.com