The Beauty of the Beloved

The beauty of the beloved In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, the author cleverly refers to the passing of time with images of nature and the seasons. He uses a summer’s day as an image for how short-lived youth and love can be. Let me scrutinize the poem. The speaker initiates the poem with a rhetorical question: “ Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” This question is comparing his beloved to the summer time …

…believe that it is because of her internal beauty “Thou art more lovely and more temperate”(line 2), that the writer believes his beloved deserves to live on forever. All in all, in this simple but skillfully created poem, William Shakespeare suggests the futility and foolishness of attempting to compare humans and nature – in particular, women and nature’s objects of beauty- and he does so in a dignified and at the same time simple way.