Amazing authors can induce thoughts by a single word. The ideas that can form in our heads by a small phrase are powerful. Only the most talented and capable authors can provoke such feelings within us. Who is more than able to stir these feelings in a reader but William Shakespeare? His various plays keep us entranced and curious but it is his poetry that strikes a chord deep within us. Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare is particularly powerful. He writes about a love that cannot be compared to anything in the world because of his deep infatuation.
Shakespeare wrote his sonnet when he was deeply in love with a woman. He starts off his sonnet by implanting an image in our head of a summer day. A summer day triggers a scene that flashes in our head of children playing and the sun shining, basically a carefree day where everything is beautiful. He contemplates whether or not to compare his love to this ideal day, "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?" but decides against it in his second line because he feels his love is "more lovely and more temperate" that this day. He then proceeds to bombard us with images of natural nuisances such as windy days that "…shake the darling buds of May," hot weather magnified because it is coming from heaven, and changing seasons. Shakespeare has taken the idea of a warm breezy summer day and twisted it into a sweltering day with the sun beating down on us.
However, in the...