Shadowing Practice: Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: Explanation and Analysis - Learn English Speaking with Video
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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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Woordenschat en spreektips bij deze les
Deze spreekles is gebaseerd op de video “Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: Explanation and Analysis”. Deze woorden komen het vaakst terug: word, sonnet, poem, summer, beauty. Deze video bevat 25 zinnen en 4329 woorden om na te spreken. Het gesproken deel duurt 27:11. De spreker praat in een natuurlijk tempo van ongeveer 159 woorden per minuut, dicht bij een alledaags gesprek. 84% van de woorden hoort bij de 3.000 meest gebruikte Engelse woorden; de rest kun je beter vooraf bekijken. 28 van de 25 zinnen zijn vragen, dus het is goede oefening voor vraagintonatie en korte antwoorden.
Belangrijke woorden in deze video
15 woorden uit de video die het leren waard zijn, met uitspraak en betekenis:
| Woord | Uitspraak | Betekenis |
|---|---|---|
| poem zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈpoʊ.əm/ | gedicht, vers |
| rhyme zelfstandig naamwoord | /ɹaɪm/ | rijmwoord, rijm |
| compare werkwoord | /kəmˈpɛɚ/ | vergelijken |
| poet zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈpoʊ.ət/ | dichter, poëet |
| beloved bijvoeglijk naamwoord | /bɪˈlʌvd/ | geliefd, bemind |
| decline werkwoord | /dɪˈklaɪn/ | afnemen, terugvallen |
| poetry zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈpoʊ.ə.tɹi/ | poëzie, dichtkunst |
| refer werkwoord | /ɹɪˈfɜː/ | verwijzen, doorverwijzen |
| possession zelfstandig naamwoord | /pəˈzɛʃn̩/ | bezetenheid |
| poetic bijvoeglijk naamwoord | /poʊˈɛtɪk/ | poëtisch, dichterlijk |
| lease zelfstandig naamwoord | /liːs/ | pacht, lease |
| shade zelfstandig naamwoord | /ʃeɪd/ | schaduw |
| unchanged bijvoeglijk naamwoord | /ʌnˈt͡ʃeɪnd͡ʒd/ | onveranderd |
| rhythm zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈɹɪð.əm/ | ritme |
| critic zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈkɹɪt.ɪk/ | criticus |
Phrasal verbs die je zult horen
| Woord | Uitspraak | Betekenis |
|---|---|---|
| point out werkwoord | aanwijzen, aanduiden | |
| come back werkwoord | terugkomen | |
| get off werkwoord | van ... afgaan | |
| set up werkwoord | /ˌsɛt ˈʌp/ | bereiden, voorbereiden |
| wake up werkwoord | /ˌweɪk ˈʌp/ | wakker worden, ontwaken |
Zinnen om te herhalen
Korte, volledige zinnen uit de video die je in alledaagse gesprekken kunt gebruiken:
- 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?
Grammatica in deze video
De structuren die de spreker het meest gebruikt, met de exacte woorden uit de video:
| Structuur | In de video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + voltooid deelwoord — iets uit het verleden dat nu nog telt | there's been · has not been accepted · has made |
| Lijdende vorm be + voltooid deelwoord — het gaat om wat er gebeurt, niet om wie het doet | is called · could be mentioned · are actually referred |
| Betrekkelijke bijzinnen who / which + zin — extra informatie over een persoon of ding | this, which is · sonnet, which means · sonnet, which is |
Uitspraak om op te letten
De spreker gebruikt 65 samentrekkingen en verkorte vormen, zoals you're, they're, we're. Spreek ze kort uit, zoals je ze hoort.
- De “th”-klanken: rhythm /ˈɹɪð.əm/, smooth /smuːð/, breathe /bɹiːð/, eighth /eɪtθ/
- De klanken “sh” en “zh”: possession /pəˈzɛʃn̩/, shade /ʃeɪd/, ownership /ˈoʊnɚʃɪp/, shake /ˈʃeɪk/, reputation /ˌɹɛpjʊˈteɪʃən/
- Lange woorden — let op de klemtoon: reputation /ˌɹɛpjʊˈteɪʃən/, biological /ˌbaɪ.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪ.kəl/, ironically /aɪˈɹɑnɪkli/, visually /ˈvɪzju.əli/, naturally /ˈnæt͡ʃ.(ə.)ɹə.li/
Klanken die Nederlandstaligen lastig vinden:
- Stemhebbende eindmedeklinker — /b/, /d/, /g/, /z/, /v/ niet verscherpen: beloved /bɪˈlʌvd/, shade /ʃeɪd/, unchanged /ʌnˈt͡ʃeɪnd͡ʒd/, bud /bʌd/, fade /feɪd/
- /æ/ — opener dan de Nederlandse “e”: contrast /kənˈt(ʃ)ɹæst/, whereas /(h)wɛɹˈæz/, handsome /ˈhæn.səm/, naturally /ˈnæt͡ʃ.(ə.)ɹə.li/, shadow /ˈʃædəʊ̯/
- /g/ — een harde plofklank, geen Nederlandse “g”: gray /ɡɹeɪ/, gradually /ˈɡɹæd͡ʒuəli/, cargo /ˈkɑɹɡoʊ/, brag /bɹæɡ/, ambiguity /æm.bɪˈɡjuː.ɪ.ti/
Zo oefen je met deze video
- Luister de hele video één keer zonder te spreken en noteer de woorden die je niet kent.
- Begin op 0,75× snelheid, spreek zin voor zin na en ga terug naar normale snelheid zodra het makkelijk gaat.
- Neem jezelf op en vergelijk met het origineel; let daarbij op woorden als poem, rhyme, compare.
Wat is de Shadowing-techniek?
Shadowing is een wetenschappelijk onderbouwde taalleermethode die oorspronkelijk is ontwikkeld voor professionele tolkentraining en gepopulariseerd door polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. De methode is eenvoudig maar krachtig: je luistert naar native Engelse audio en herhaalt het onmiddellijk hardop — als een schaduw die de spreker volgt met slechts 1–2 seconden vertraging. In tegenstelling tot passief luisteren of grammaticadrills, dwingt shadowing je hersenen en mondspieren om echte spraakpatronen tegelijkertijd te verwerken en te reproduceren. Onderzoek toont aan dat het de uitspraaknauwkeurigheid, intonatie, ritme, verbonden spraak, luisterbegrip en spreekvaardigheid aanzienlijk verbetert — waardoor het een van de meest effectieve methoden is voor IELTS Speaking-voorbereiding en echte Engelse communicatie.