Sonnet 18: Love, Power, and Immortality

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everlasting brevity (eternal summer) and the eternal lines grow to time (i.e., within duration). The couplet carries the tempering of triumph yet further: the lines last only so long as there exist, among the men who can breathes, eyes that can see this poem. Only so long will the putatively eternal lines live in time” (Vendler 3). This implies that despite Shakespeare’s promise, the image of her beauty and youth will cease to exist if mankind is no longer around to appreciate the sonnet. Upon analyzing the sonnet as a whole one cannot deny the inevitable widening of scope.

The descriptive wording and personification of the beauty of the woman is the central idea through the sonnet. In line 4, Shakespeare chooses to introduce the element of time. “And a summer’s lease hath all top short a date” (Shakespeare 4). It is here that he clarifies that there is only a very short period in which the positive qualities of summer (“lovely”, “temperate”) outweigh the negative (“wind”, “heat”). The beauty of summer that Shakespeare describes is intended to answer the rhetorical question he poses in the first line. Effectively, the first two lines act as an introduction of the woman, while the remaining stanzas help shape the answer to this question. Shakespeare’s comparison of the woman to a summer’s day is in effect irrelevant. The importance of the sonnet is the result of the initial comparison.

The second idea that Shakespeare presents in this rather short piece is that time ends all. “Our universe has existed for nearly 14 billion years, and as far as most people are concerned, the universe should continue to exist for billions of years more” (Than 1). It is this very concept that leads Shakespeare to believe that he can immortalize his loved ones through verse. However, even during the period in which Shakespeare was alive, no one could be certain that time would not end eventually. As mentioned previously, the notion of time introduced in the second stanza of the sonnet. In line 8, the idea of time presents itself once again in the form of the “end” of a season: “By chance, or natures changing course, untrimm’d;” (Shakespeare 8). Because of the sonnet and mankind’s willingness to read its verses, the woman’s beauty and youth does not suffer from the boundedness that time presents.

The immunity of the woman’s image from the treacherousness of time is accomplished through Shakespeare’s verses. As the second to last stanza points out “When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;” (Shakespeare 11). The use of the word “eternal” provides a rather sharp contradiction to the finiteness of time presented in the first and second stanzas. This immortalization is carried throughout the sonnet until the final stanza, which states that her image will be preserved by the eyes of readers.

Works Cited:

1. Annette Keogh, Glen Worthey, Ever Rodriguez, HASRG/SUL, Stanford University, Prepared for the Stanford Humanities Center. "Excerpts from Helen Vendler..."Presidential Lectures: Helen Vendler: Excerpts. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2017. <https://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/vendler/excerpts.html>.

2. Than, Ker. "Time Will End in Five Billion Years, Physicists Predict." National Geographic. National Geographic Society, 29 Oct. 2010. Web. 27 Feb. 2017. <http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/10/101027-science-space-universe-end-of-time-multiverse-inflation/>.

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