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or Tone= mood,Diction,Irony,Theme,Structure,Style=metre,rhthm=repetition,Metaphor = magery=personification,assossance,alliteration
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? a
Thou art more lovely and more temperate: b
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, a
And summer's lease hath all too short a date: b

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, c
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; d
And every fair from fair sometime declines, c
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd; d
But thy eternal summer shall not fade e
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; f
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, e
When in eternal lines to time thou growest: f

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, g
So long lives this and this gives life to thee. G

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.
In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.

2007-09-09 22:01:14 · 2 answers · asked by Dr Ask 1 in Arts & Humanities Poetry

2 answers

Sonnet 18
IMAGE - lover's everlasting beauty compared to a day in Summer
personification - eye of heaven (the sun); Death brag thou wander'st in his shade
parallelism - every fair from fair sometime declines
metaphor - thy eternal summer shall
semantic twist - So long lives this and this gives life to thee

**Try to study the above and apply to Oscar Wilde

Sonnet 18
This is one of the most famous of all the sonnets, justifiably so. But it would be a mistake to take it entirely in isolation, for it links in with so many of the other sonnets through the themes of the descriptive power of verse; the ability of the poet to depict the fair youth adequately, or not; and the immortality conveyed through being hymned in these 'eternal lines'. It is noticeable that here the poet is full of confidence that his verse will live as long as there are people drawing breath upon the earth, whereas later he apologises for his poor wit and his humble lines which are inadequate to encompass all the youth's excellence. Now, perhaps in the early days of his love, there is no such self-doubt and the eternal summer of the youth is preserved forever in the poet's lines. The poem also works at a rather curious level of achieving its objective through dispraise. The summer's day is found to be lacking in so many respects (too short, too hot, too rough, sometimes too dingy), but curiously enough one is left with the abiding impression that 'the lovely boy' is in fact like a summer's day at its best, fair, warm, sunny, temperate, one of the darling buds of May, and that all his beauty has been wonderfully highlighted by the comparison




good luck

2007-09-10 02:50:19 · answer #1 · answered by ari-pup 7 · 0 0

Your question is a homework assignment. Again!

And you've appeared to miss some quintessential thing. Again!

2007-09-10 09:39:50 · answer #2 · answered by Dancing Bee 6 · 1 1

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