Paper 1: Close Reading And Explication ✓ Solved

Paper 1: Close Reading/Explication. The first paper will be

Paper 1: Close Reading/Explication. The first paper will be a close reading/explication. An explication is a line-by-line analysis of a particular play or poem. The goal of the paper is to provide the audience with a more nuanced reading of the text and to show hidden meanings. For this paper, closely examine your passage or poem line-by-line (or sentence-by-sentence). Provide some summary only as necessary; focus on unpacking meaning, explaining references (e.g., a Greek god), and contextualizing historically and within the larger work. Choose from texts in verse in the course textbook through Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or any Sappho poems in the textbook (excluding Sappho Poems 1 and 31). Do not use Hamlet’s 'To be or not to be' soliloquy, Horatio’s speech (Act 1, Scene 1), Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', or any passages from uploaded example papers. Do not write about Wollstonecraft or The Thousand and One Nights. If you choose a lengthy text, narrow to a specific passage. Keep the passage to about 30 lines. It is recommended to include the passage at the beginning of the paper (this does not count toward the page count). Use outside scholarly sources as needed and cite them in-text and on a Works Cited page; sources should come from the library’s database or websites ending .edu, .org, or .gov (other websites require approval). Do not use SparkNotes, No Fear Shakespeare, Shmoop, or GradeKeeper. Length: 3–4 pages (not including Works Cited or the passage).

Paper For Above Instructions

Passage (William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18)

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, 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, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Introduction

Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 stages a familiar conceit—comparing the addressee to a summer's day—but converts that comparison into an argument about poetic immortality. A close, line-by-line explication reveals how diction, rhetorical turn, and prosodic control move the poem from casual question to bold claim that the poem itself confers lasting life on the beloved (Vendler 1997; Booth 2000). The analysis below follows the sonnet's sequence of images and argumentative pivots, showing how Shakespeare uses seasonal imagery, personification, and the sonnet volta to transform transience into permanence (Duncan-Jones 1991; Kerrigan 1995).

Lines 1–4: The Opening Conceit and Its Limits

Line 1 poses a rhetorical question: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" The speaker frames the comparison as tentative, a polite opening that invites assent but prepares to complicate it. The anaphoric "Shall I" performs hesitation while initiating the poem's analytic mode (Greenblatt 2004). The immediate answer—"Thou art more lovely and more temperate"—introduces a corrective: the beloved surpasses the standard of summer not merely in degree but in quality. "Temperate" invokes moderation, steady composure; this adjective inverts the usual association of summer with heat and excess, suggesting the beloved’s grace is measured rather than overwrought (Vendler 1997).

The next two lines enumerate summer's defects. "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May" naturalizes loss: the same season that fosters growth also threatens it. "Summer's lease hath all too short a date" uses legal language—'lease'—to emphasize temporariness, framing nature's bounty as contractually limited. Shakespeare's diction here compresses imagery and ideology: beauty depends on contingency and is governed by time (Booth 2000).

Lines 5–8: The Case for Transience

The third quatrain widens the critique. "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines" personifies the sun and senses its inconsistencies: "often is his gold complexion dimm'd." The use of the sun ("eye of heaven") associates divine or cosmic observation with variability; even celestial radiance is fallible (Kerrigan 1995). "And every fair from fair sometime declines" universalizes decay—beauty diminishes either by "chance" or by "nature's changing course untrimm'd." The pairing of fortune and natural law suggests both contingency and inevitability are at work.

This sequence deepens the initial corrective: summer fails as a stable standard. The argument is cumulative and moves from particular (May buds) to general (every fair), preparing the sonnet for its redemptive claim. Formally, the iambic pentameter remains regular even as images of change and disruption accumulate, a metrical control that models the poem’s promise of order against nature's flux (Schoenfeldt 2007).

Line 9–12: The Volta and the Alternative of "Eternal Summer"

The volta at line 9—"But thy eternal summer shall not fade"—marks the rhetorical turn from diagnosis to remedy. The word "But" negates the preceding logic and introduces a metaphysical assertion: unlike natural beauty, the beloved's "eternal summer" is immune to "fade." "Eternal" explicitly contrasts with "lease" and "short a date" from line 4, setting up a temporal opposition between mortal season and poetic permanence (Vendler 1997).

"Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest" recharacterizes beauty as property—"that fair thou owest"—which the beloved 'owns' and therefore retains. The conceit subtly aligns aesthetic value with legal tenure, but now in perpetuity. Then, "Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade" personifies Death as a braggart, a rhetorical diminishment: Death's power is rhetorical rather than ontological when faced with the poem's alternative (Bloom 1998). The clause "When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st" reveals the mechanism: the addressee grows into time through "eternal lines"—that is, through the poem's lines—which render the beloved impervious to temporal erasure (Duncan-Jones 1991).

Couplet: The Poem’s Claim to Immortality

The closing couplet states the poem’s compact between reader and poem: "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." The anaphora "So long" frames the poem as conditional but far-reaching—its duration stretches as long as human perception persists. The final "this" (twice) is syntactically ambiguous but semantically clear: the poem itself sustains the beloved's presence. The verse performs the immortality it promises; readers continually renew the beloved's life by reading. Critics have long noted this metapoetic move: literature becomes a vehicle of survival (Greenblatt 2004; Booth 2000).

Contextual and Critical Notes

Historically, Sonnet 18 participates in Renaissance debates about time, fame, and the powers of verse (Cambridge Companion 2007). The sonnet sequence frequently addressed patronage, lineage, and poetic legacy; this poem makes a universal argument about the capacity of art to arrest decay. Scholars emphasize the sonnet’s strategic compression: a personal address becomes a universal claim about poetic agency (Kerrigan 1995; Vendler 1997). The poem’s rhetorical modesty—opening as a conversational question—masks a grand assertion about language's power, a characteristic move in Shakespeare’s lyric practice (Schoenfeldt 2007).

In conclusion, a close reading of Sonnet 18 shows how Shakespeare converts a commonplace comparison into a sustained argument for poetic immortality. The sonnet’s diction, its rhetorical progression from doubt to triumph, and its metrical control all work together to make the poem itself the site of the beloved’s enduring life. As critics have argued, the poem stages not merely praise but a theory of verse as preservative—an idea that has shaped responses to Shakespeare’s lyrics for centuries (Vendler 1997; Greenblatt 2004).

References

• Shakespeare, William. Sonnet 18. In The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. W. W. Norton, 2016.
• Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Harvard University Press, 1997.
• Booth, Stephen. Shakespeare's Sonnets: Edited with Analytic Commentary. Yale University Press, 2000.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. W. W. Norton, 2004.
• Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Arden Shakespeare, 1991.
• Kerrigan, John. The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint. Penguin, 1995.
• Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books, 1998.
• Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Poetry. Ed. Patrick Cheney. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Schoenfeldt, Michael. Literature and the English Reformation, with essays on the sonnets. University Press, 2007.
• Norton Anthology of English Literature. General editors, W. W. Norton & Company, 2016 edition.