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Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 is by far his most famous sonnet,
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so I thought it might be nice to give you a detailed explanation of what it means
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and how you might read it.
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Now the main message of this sonnet is fairly obvious, so the poem starts with a question, shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
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And as the poem proceeds we do get this comparison.
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We have the beloved, Shakespeare says hey, I love you, and then we have summer, and the question is which is better?
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And of course the answer is the beloved.
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But there is a problem with this, which is the fact that the beloved and summer are both subject to decay.
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Both of them face time.
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Summer ends and the beloved's gonna get old, and that produces a new problem.
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And so at the end of the poem the answer, the solution to all of this, is to say well, poetry can solve this because
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if I write this poem and make you famous then you will continue to live on in this,
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in this particular poem, and this poem will give life to you.
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You're going to be famous forever, and we refer to this as poetic immortality.
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That is the gist of the poem, but as we'll see there's quite a bit more to it as Shakespeare makes this argument.
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Now before we get too deep into the weeds, I just want to say a few things about the form of the poem.
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This is a fairly typical Shakespearean sonnet, which means that it has three quatrains.
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A quatrain is a four -line stanza and then also a rhyming couplet at the end.
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It also has a unique rhyme scheme, and as you compare these two sonnets you can see that there are some major differences.
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That said, this poem does have one thing in common with the Petrarchan sonnet, which is that the volta,
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as it's referred to, also known as the poetic turn, happens right here after the eighth line.
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And that's typical of a Petrarchan sonnet, whereas with Shakespeare the poetic turn tends to happen with the final rhyming couplet.
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What is a poetic turn?
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Well this is where we get the solution to the problem.
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This is where suddenly the poet turns things around, goes in a different direction, and provides a kind of startling and interesting conclusion.
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We can also say something about the rhyme scheme, and the rhyme scheme here is what we call iambic pentameter,
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which means that we have these units where we have two beats.
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One is stressed, one is not stressed, so I'm not sure if it makes sense to call them beats,
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but we have an unstressed syllable followed by a stress syllable, and then we do that five times and we get iambic pentameter.
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Penta means five.
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The rhythm is generally quite smooth, which is what adds to the appeal of the poem and why the poem is justifiably famous,
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but there are a few awkward moments.
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Well, they're not necessarily awkward, they're just different.
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So with line three we have rough winds.
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This is where we have two stresses in a row.
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This is called a spondy.
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There we go.
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And it makes sense to have a spondy here
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because of course the winds are rough and so we can't have this smooth nice meter here.
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But generally speaking we do have a very nice rhythm in the poem,
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and you have to restrain yourself from following the rhythm too much when you read it.
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So don't read it like, Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
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That's gonna get really annoying.
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Just read it naturally shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" And that's totally fine.
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If you want to be more dramatic you can emphasize one of those words, but I would hesitate to do that.
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I would just let the line reach the listener as a whole.
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Okay, so that's a little bit about the rhythm here.
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Now occasionally Shakespeare also includes some interesting sound effects in the middle of a line.
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So if we look for instance at this line,
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line eight, we have by chance the ch sound or nature's changing course.
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So you have these three ch sounds kind of interesting there.
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At the end you have this internal rhyme with lives
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and gives which creates a nice symmetry and it adds to the effect, the point that the poet is making there.
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We also have this nice balance of fair and fair.
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Shake and has a nice internal kind of a sound.
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Lots of other examples could be mentioned, but it gives you a little bit of a sense of how Shakespeare creates
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this very pleasing effect through the form of the poem.
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Before we jump in any further by reading the individual lines, I should also say something about how this poem fits into the larger sonnet sequence.
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So you might know that Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets,
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so 154, of which the first 126 are to a young man,
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and the last ones all the way to the end are to a dark lady.
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And there's been a lot of dispute about well
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which is more controversial and does it mean that Shakespeare was gay and questions like that.
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I'm not going to get into that in this particular video.
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Now in terms of these first 126 sonnets,
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the first 17 are actually referred to often as the procreation sonnets, and Shakespeare's argument to the young man here is,
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hey, you should get married at some point, be a good idea, then you're gonna have kids and offspring, they will look like you,
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all these little mini -me's running around, and you're gonna be famous through them.
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Your reputation, your fame will live on.
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So that point when you read those sonnets you see that poetry as an argument, as something that is worth something,
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is held in fairly low esteem.
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So in sonnet 16, for instance, Shakespeare refers to his barren rhyme.
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My rhyme is like infertile, it cannot give you kids, but you should have kids and that will be to your advantage.
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Then in sonnet 17 things start to change a little bit because at the end in the rhyming couplet,
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Shakespeare writes, but were some child of yours alive that time, you should live twice in it and in my rhyme.
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So we start to see the idea that, hey, you could also live in rhyme, not just in a child.
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But even in this sonnet the main option is procreation, and rhyme poetry is seen as inferior.
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So sonnet 18 then marks a shift by saying, wait a second, maybe poetic immortality is better, that gets repeated in sonnet 19
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and then it comes back sporadically throughout the rest of the sonnet sequence in sonnets like 55 and so on.
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So that gives you a bit of a sense of the context then in terms of what
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Shakespeare is trying to do here.
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And I should mention that sonnets 18 and 19 are sometimes included in the procreation sonnets,
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but it's better not to do that, they are quite distinct.
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Let's now jump into the poem then, and as you can see it starts with a question, which is quite interesting.
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Why does he start with a question?
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Well, there are a few possibilities.
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One, of course, is to provide an easy way to set up the comparison.
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Shall I compare you?
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Well, let's compare.
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You might compare here another very famous poem by Elizabeth Bear Browning writing in the 19th century.
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Her sonnet 14 starts with, How do I love thee?
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Let me count the ways.
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Very famous opening as well.
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So that's one reason to start with a question just to create the comparison.
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In the second place the question is interesting because it makes us think, well, is the poetic comparison even necessary?
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Do we need to compare you to a summer's day?
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You're so obviously better.
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Is this comparison even necessary?
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So that provides a sort of implicit praise for the beloved.
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You are so beautiful, so handsome, do I even need to do this?
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In the third place, and this is perhaps more interesting, we tend to focus here on the comparison between the beloved,
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the, and the day, but there's also this pronoun I, and if we focus on that we we start to wonder,
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well, is the poet not also drawing attention to himself?
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Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
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Is the Beloved dependent on the poet for being remembered?
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I might not compare you.
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Do I really feel like this?" So if that's the case, it really points out that the Beloved owes something to the poet as well.
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And then finally, very briefly, the word shall makes us think about the future and it starts to make us think about the question of time.
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There's lots of references to time in this poem.
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Sometime, often, right?
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Chance, nature's changing course.
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Time is going to be a problem and somehow the poet needs to deal with this particular issue.
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The second line reads, thou art more lovely and more temperate, so you are more beautiful, more handsome than summer.
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Notice the play on words on the word temperate.
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Temperate can mean self -restrained or even temperate.
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It can also mean having a mild climate, and this is what allows us to bring these two things together.
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In other words, the summer has to do with the climate, and we can't really say about summer that summer is self -restrained,
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but a person can be self -restrained.
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and a person can also be mild, you know, not too hot, not too cold.
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So the fact that two things refer to a person, whereas only one thing refers to the summer,
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also shows that there's something more to a person.
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A person can also be self -restrained, can have this character aspect that a summer cannot.
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Then we read, rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and you might have noticed that May is technically not in summer,
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it's in the spring, but the idea seems to be here
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that in May we have these very cute little closed buds on the flowers.
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They're beautiful and they're adorable, but eventually in the summer they will open, those darling buds of May,
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then the winds come by and they shake them and the petals fall off.
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It's very sad, but this is not going to happen to you.
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You're so much more dependable, and you last longer, and you are also not rough.
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You are even keeled and even tempered.
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The fourth line introduces a legal image, so it says, and summer's lease hath all too short a date.
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If you lease a car, for instance, you don't own it forever,
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you make payments maybe, but your lease has a date to it, an end date, and the idea here is that date means allotted time.
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It's the time given.
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So summer is gonna pass into autumn, and then summer is over.
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Summer cannot cling to its possession.
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It's gonna lose its lease.
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It's interesting that in the original, if you look at the original text here, the S here is a long S,
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and what that means is that visually this looks a little bit like the word leaf, which kind of fits as well, right?
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Like if you think of summer's leaf hath all too short a date, the leaves of the summer are going to fall off in the fall.
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So that seems to fit beautifully.
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In the 1920s somebody actually suggested that we should change the editing here, that leaf was a mistake and leaf is the intended meaning.
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That has not been accepted for a good reason, but more recently in the last decade
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somebody has made the argument that at least visually we should be aware of this potential pun.
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The main meaning is lease, but if you look at it in the original it does remind you a little bit of leaf as well,
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and the word leaf can also mean page.
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So if you think of the final conclusion here that you're going to live on in poetry,
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well, you're gonna live on on the leaf, the page.
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So maybe of interest, but definitely a bit of an obscure play on words.
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The next quatrain continues the comparison, so it says sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines.
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The eye of heaven, of course, is the Sun, and the fact that we're referring to the eye, the metaphor here for the Sun,
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this should be a U, it's a bit hard to read,
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The fact that we're using this metaphor makes for a beautiful comparison with the person as well,
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because you can say your eye is not too hot, right?
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You're not too disdainful or hot -tempered, you're much more even -keeled.
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It says, and often is his gold complexion dimmed.
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The idea here is that you have a cloud in front of the sun, so the sun is trying to shine out,
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there you go, but it can't because it's dimmed by the clouds.
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Sometimes it's too hot in the summer, sometimes it's too cold because the sun goes into hiding, and this inconsistency does not apply to the beloved.
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This word complexion, critics have also noted that this word has a double meaning as well.
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So it can mean your face or your appearance, your countenance, that's the main meaning here that the face of the sun is dimmed.
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But in the Renaissance people talked about the four humors, and then they used the word complexion to mean your character, your inner makeup.
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You could have a sanguine complexion or a phlegmatic complexion.
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You're dominated by a different humor which is going to affect who you are.
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That relates back to the word temperate, which refers to character as well.
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So let's go on then.
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The next line reads, and every fair from fair sometimes declines.
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Now the first fair here means fair thing, and the second fair here means beauty or fairness.
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In other words, every fair person or thing is gonna lose its fairness, its beauty.
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You're gonna get old, you'll get gray hair, not to say that gray is not beautiful, but things will change.
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so every fair is going to move away from, decline from, get worse from its initial fairness, its initial beauty.
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And this word decline may help us to understand this
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because in the Renaissance decline often referred not just to getting worse but to moving away from.
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Originally the word really had this idea of turning away from, bending away from, and it was often used for the sun as well.
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So if the sun is sinking in the sky, it's declining.
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In this case what you could say is that the standard of beauty, so we could say the standard of beauty,
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there we go, is going to remain.
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This is what we're striving for, this is what's beautiful, but the actual person is going to decline,
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so their beauty will not be the same as the standard anymore, but will decline from it.
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Kind of sad, isn't it?
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The next line gives us a couple of reasons why this happens.
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So the first is chance.
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Imagine that you're walking along on the sidewalk and you walk into a lamppost, you get a cut on your face, now you have a scar,
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and you're like, oh well that was too bad, now I'm not beautiful anymore,
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unless scars are beautiful, and there you see how a chance random event can suddenly make this happen.
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But we also have nature's changing course untrimmed, and we can talk about how nature over time is going to,
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through its changing course, make you grow old as well.
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Your life goes up and down, it changes, one day you're gonna wake up and you're not the same person that you were before.
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Maybe you some wrinkles.
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So that's another reason why this decline is happening.
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The difficulty is with this word untrimmed.
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The main meaning here is taking away something that was ornamental.
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So before we have this fair thing, a beautiful thing, and now it is untrimmed.
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So the beauty has been taken away.
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That's the primary meaning here.
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Untrimmed means not put in good order, having the ornamentation removed.
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Some people, though, and Shakespearean critics are like this, they like to read every possible pun into a word.
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Some critics have suggested another possible meaning, and they point to the fact that when it comes to ships we sometimes
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or people sometimes use the word untrimmed as well.
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So think of a ship going along here.
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We'll draw a little picture there.
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There we go.
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The ship is going along and you can do two things to trim it.
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One is to balance the ship by moving cargo to one side or the other, so that's to trim the ship.
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The other one is to change the sails, adjust the sails, so that you can go in a particular direction.
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But in this case we have this word untrimmed, so we don't get a boat being steered,
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we get a boat that is completely random, completely uncontrolled.
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If that's the meaning we're going with, then we should not apply untrim to the word fair, but we should apply it to nature's changing course.
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And what it means then is that nature, as it's changing its course over time, is out of control.
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It's like a boat that is not being steered, not being controlled.
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So we could translate this word then as unchanged.
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We haven't changed the ship, we haven't affected it to make sure it goes where we want it to go, it's simply unchanged.
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It is as it is, and it's going all over the place.
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That does lead to a kind of oxymoron, though, because then we're saying nature's changing unchanged course.
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But that makes kind of sense, because nature's course is both random and predictable.
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You can predict that it is random.
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It's an unchanged changing course,
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or changing unchanged course, because the fact that nature is full of change is unchanging.
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Okay, if your head is spinning at this point, not to worry.
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The main meaning here is removing the ornamentation, and that's the easiest way to read this.
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You can always just read it as referring back to fair and having the sense of at some point, whether by chance or by nature,
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you're gonna lose your ornamentation, your beauty, and you're gonna be untrimmed.
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Let's turn then to the final six lines, to the volta, and now the poet says, but thy eternal summer shall not fade.
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So you are going to last.
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Now the word summer is no longer in contrast to the beloved but is being applied to the beloved,
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which is a kind of rhetorical technique here to shift the comparison.
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You're going to last because your beauty, your summer, is not going to fade.
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You're not going to lose possession of that fair thou oased.
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All right, oased is another tricky word.
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It can mean one of two things.
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It can mean to own or to owe.
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And because this apostrophe kind of hides the real meaning, we have to guess what the actual meaning might be.
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The easiest and most sensible option is own, so what this would say then is you're not going to lose possession of that beauty,
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that fairness, that you own.
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You own a great beauty, through my poetry you're going to keep it?
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There you go, that's the meaning.
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Not very difficult.
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I should also add that there is a play here on the contrast between possession and ownership.
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We tend to say that possession is nine -tenths of the law.
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In other words, if you're a squatter staying in somebody else's property and they're never there, after a while somebody might be like,
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or the judge might be like, well you stayed there long enough, maybe you have some rights to this place.
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At least in some countries this is the case.
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But usually we say ownership is more important than possession.
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If you have a legal document and you say, hey look, I have title to this land, get off, then that's more important than possession.
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So he's saying in a sense you own your beauty, and that is a little bit ironic because can you own your beauty?
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Aren't you going to lose it over time?
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Aren't you going to get old and die?
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Is it really something that you own in that sense?
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And the second meaning here, owe, kind of plays with that ambiguity.
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So let's try to understand what it means to say that you owe your fare, whatever that means.
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All right, well the word fare can also be a pun.
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If you pay the fare, then you pay somebody to get on the bus, let's say here's my ticket, I owe you this.
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If we talk about beauty, you could say beauty is something that was just given to me by chance.
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I happen to be good -looking, you're not as good -looking as me.
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It's too bad.
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But you know, I feel sorry for you, and so I'll point out that this was just by chance.
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That's all it is.
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But when time comes, you know, you have to pay the piper, you have to pay the fare, you have to give back what you owe,
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and you're gonna lose your beauty.
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So that's the second sense of this, the other way to read this.
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And it also fits in nicely, of course, because if we think of the poem itself, the poem with all its different lines,
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it's saying, hey, you're gonna be remembered in this.
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People are gonna know who you are.
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But now we can see the poem almost as a legal document as well to say, this poem gives a kind of ownership forever,
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and so in a sense we could even say, you owe me.
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As a poet, you're gonna owe me.
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That's not really the sense directly here, but you can kind of play with this pun.
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All right, maybe reading too much into this,
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but I'm just trying to give you all the different perspectives on this poem so you can really make sense of it.
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Just to sum up what we've seen so far.
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We've seen that Shakespeare started with a comparison by saying, hey, should I compare you to a summer's day?
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He does do that.
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He says you are much better than a summer's day, but we do start to get this problem, which is that beauty fades and decays,
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and then Shakespeare turns it around and says, but your eternal summer, your beauty, is not going to fade.
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I will remember it through my poem.
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There's one more enemy here, not just time but also death, and of course they're kind of the same.
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Nor shall death brag, thou wanderest in his shade.
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This is likely a reference to Psalm 23, to the valley of the shadow of death,
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but in Psalm 23 God provides the rescue.
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Here it's the poet who provides the rescue, maybe a little bit tongue in cheek.
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But this word shade as a result is kind of ironic,
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because given everything we saw before about temperate climates and beautiful places to be, shade sounds rather pleasant.
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But it's death saying, hey come into my shade here, come and enjoy the shade, and what it really means is you're gonna die.
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The poet then is using this word ironically, and we're gonna see a lot of irony in these final lines.
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And as he goes on, here's another irony, he starts to brag.
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He says, well, death can't brag, but I can.
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In eternal lines to time thou growest.
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lines here is no longer bloodlines, like your offspring, but it's poetic lines.
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And over time you're gonna grow in your fame and your reputation.
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But this word is somewhat ironic as well, of course, because can a person really grow through poetry?
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Does poetry really grow?
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Doesn't this remind us more of those biological children?
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They will grow.
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They will literally grow.
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So you can see here that these natural metaphors are being applied in a different context.
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And the same thing is true for gives life at the end, which we talked about before, the sense that the poem,
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the poet, gives life to the beloved now.
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Gives birth, you might say.
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So long as men can breathe, their eyes can see, so long lives this, this poem, and this gives life to thee.
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That is quite a boast, isn't it?
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And it ironically mixes this biological natural metaphor with something more artificial,
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which of course is poetry.
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So an incredibly intricate sonnet.
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The critic Helen Wendler has pointed out
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that Shakespeare is very clever here in moving gradually outwards as he starts with the and a day,
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very specific, and then moving towards a month in May, then we have the summer, the season, then we move to the heavens,
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we move to nature, we move to death, we move to eternity, and it just gets bigger and bigger
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and bigger as Shakespeare very cleverly kind of moves us to these bigger questions about what actually matters.
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And that's another reason why the sonnet is often remembered and treasured.
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I hope this helps you a little bit then to make sense of Sonnet 18.
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I went on a little bit longer than I thought I would, but hopefully this gives you a really detailed understanding of the poem.
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Vocabolario e note di pronuncia per questa lezione
Questa lezione di conversazione si basa sul video “Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: Explanation and Analysis”. Le parole che ritornano più spesso: word, sonnet, poem, summer, beauty. Questo video contiene 25 frasi e 4329 parole da ripetere con lo shadowing. Il parlato dura 27:11. Chi parla ha un ritmo naturale di circa 159 parole al minuto, vicino a una conversazione quotidiana. Il 84% delle parole rientra nelle 3.000 più comuni dell’inglese; conviene studiare le altre prima di iniziare. 28 delle sue 25 frasi sono domande: un buon esercizio per l’intonazione interrogativa e le risposte brevi.
Vocaboli chiave di questo video
15 parole del video che vale la pena imparare, con pronuncia e significato:
| Parola | Pronuncia | Significato |
|---|---|---|
| poem sostantivo | /ˈpoʊ.əm/ | poema, poesia |
| rhyme sostantivo | /ɹaɪm/ | rima |
| compare verbo | /kəmˈpɛɚ/ | paragonare |
| poet sostantivo | /ˈpoʊ.ət/ | poeta, poetessa |
| beloved aggettivo | /bɪˈlʌvd/ | amato, carissimo |
| decline verbo | /dɪˈklaɪn/ | declinare |
| poetry sostantivo | /ˈpoʊ.ə.tɹi/ | poesia |
| refer verbo | /ɹɪˈfɜː/ | riferire |
| possession sostantivo | /pəˈzɛʃn̩/ | possesso |
| poetic aggettivo | /poʊˈɛtɪk/ | poetico |
| shade sostantivo | /ʃeɪd/ | ombra |
| unchanged aggettivo | /ʌnˈt͡ʃeɪnd͡ʒd/ | immutato, invariato |
| rhythm sostantivo | /ˈɹɪð.əm/ | ritmo |
| critic sostantivo | /ˈkɹɪt.ɪk/ | critico |
| fairness sostantivo | /ˈfɛɚ.nəs/ | equità, imparzialità |
I phrasal verb che sentirai
| Parola | Pronuncia | Significato |
|---|---|---|
| point out verbo | additare | |
| take away verbo | /ˌteɪk əˈweɪ/ | togliere |
| come back verbo | tornare | |
| get off verbo | scendere | |
| give back verbo | rendere | |
| go up verbo | salire | |
| set up verbo | /ˌsɛt ˈʌp/ | preparare, installare |
| wake up verbo | /ˌweɪk ˈʌp/ | svegliarsi |
Frasi da ripetere
Frasi brevi e complete del video che puoi riutilizzare nella conversazione di tutti i giorni:
- Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
- Do we need to compare you to a summer's day?
- Shall "I" compare thee to a summer's day?
- Aren't you going to lose it over time?
- Doesn't this remind us more of those biological children?
La grammatica di questo video
Le strutture che chi parla usa di più, con le parole esatte del video:
| Struttura | Nel video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + participio passato — un’azione passata che conta ancora adesso | there's been · has not been accepted · has made |
| Forma passiva be + participio passato — conta ciò che accade, non chi lo fa | is stressed · is called · could be mentioned |
| Frasi relative who / which + frase — un’informazione in più su una persona o una cosa | this, which is · sonnet, which means · sonnet, which is |
Pronuncia a cui fare attenzione
Chi parla usa 65 contrazioni e forme ridotte, come you're, they're, we're. Pronunciale nella forma breve, così come le senti.
- I suoni “th”: rhythm /ˈɹɪð.əm/, smooth /smuːð/, breathe /bɹiːð/, eighth /eɪtθ/
- I suoni “sh” e “zh”: possession /pəˈzɛʃn̩/, shade /ʃeɪd/, ownership /ˈoʊnɚʃɪp/, shake /ˈʃeɪk/, reputation /ˌɹɛpjʊˈteɪʃən/
- Parole lunghe — attenzione all’accento: reputation /ˌɹɛpjʊˈteɪʃən/, biological /ˌbaɪ.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪ.kəl/, ironically /aɪˈɹɑnɪkli/, visually /ˈvɪzju.əli/, naturally /ˈnæt͡ʃ.(ə.)ɹə.li/
I suoni difficili per chi parla italiano:
- /h/ — va soffiata, non è muta: whereas /(h)wɛɹˈæz/, handsome /ˈhæn.səm/, humour /ˈhjuːmɚ/, hesitate /ˈhɛz.ə.teɪt/
- Consonante finale — senza aggiungere una vocale dopo: poet /ˈpoʊ.ət/, beloved /bɪˈlʌvd/, poetic /poʊˈɛtɪk/, lease /liːs/, shade /ʃeɪd/
- /æ/ — più aperta della “e”: contrast /kənˈt(ʃ)ɹæst/, whereas /(h)wɛɹˈæz/, handsome /ˈhæn.səm/, naturally /ˈnæt͡ʃ.(ə.)ɹə.li/, shadow /ˈʃædəʊ̯/
Come esercitarsi con questo video
- Ascolta tutto il video una volta senza parlare e annota le parole che non conosci.
- Inizia a velocità 0,75×, fai shadowing frase per frase e torna alla velocità normale quando diventa facile.
- Registrati e confronta con l’originale, facendo attenzione a parole come poem, rhyme, compare.
Cos'è la tecnica dello Shadowing?
Shadowing è una tecnica di apprendimento delle lingue supportata da studi scientifici, originariamente sviluppata per la formazione dei traduttori professionisti e resa popolare dal poliglotta Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Il metodo è semplice ma potente: ascolti un audio in inglese di madrelingua e lo ripeti immediatamente ad alta voce — come un'ombra che segue il parlante con un ritardo di solo 1–2 secondi. A differenza dell'ascolto passivo o degli esercizi di grammatica, lo shadowing costringe il tuo cervello e i muscoli della bocca a elaborare e riprodurre simultaneamente i modelli di discorso reale. La ricerca dimostra che migliora significativamente la precisione della pronuncia, l'intonazione, il ritmo, il discorso connesso, la comprensione dell'ascolto e la fluidità del parlato — rendendolo uno dei metodi più efficaci per la preparazione alla prova di speaking dell'IELTS e per la comunicazione reale in inglese.