Depiction Of Love In Shakespeares Sonnets - Essay Example

The poem begins with a rhetorical question that seeks to compare his beloved’s beauty with that of a summer day. The rhetorical question makes it obvious that his beloved is more beautiful, and this idea is reiterated in line 2 where he says that his beloved is “more lovely and more temperate”. The “darling buds”, the pretty summer flowers, are “shaken” by the violent winds, and summer has but a short span (lines 3-4). Here, Shakespeare describes that although a bright summer morning might be very beautiful and upholds nature at its best, it is not eternal.

This beauty in nature, which nurtures the “darling buds of May”, will be replaced by the harsh cold winter season which will destroy all the blooms in nature. In a similar manner, just as the flowers will die in the winter and there will be no more greenery, the youthful beauty of the beloved will also fade away and will be replaced by old age and then ultimately in death. Shakespeare’s reference to “the eye of heaven” is to the sun which shines brightly on a sunny morning but when the sky is overcast with clouds then even the sun’s brightness gets dimmed.

From here we can mark a shift in the sonnet’s theme. From here the major tone of the poem concentrates on the fading away of the youth’s beauty. Till this point in the poem Shakespeare had been comparing the youthful beauty to the inadequate beauty of the bright summer day, but in line 7 of the poem Shakespeare once more states the idea that is a recurrent theme in his sonnets: “Every fair from fair sometime declines”. This means that all beautiful objects lose their beauty at some point in time.

Here Shakespeare says that gradually every aspect of the youth’s beauty will fade away and finally result in death.