Immortality Through Verse in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 and Spenser’s Sonn

Immortality Through Verse in Shakespeares Sonnet 18 and Spensers Sonnet 75 Desiring fame, celebrity, and importance, people for centuries have yearned for the ultimately unattainable goal of immortality. Poets, too, have expressed desires in verse that their lovers remain as they are for eternity, in efforts of compliment. Though Shakespeares Sonnet 18 and Spensers Sonnet 75 from Amoretti both offer lovers this immortality through verse, only Spenser pairs this immortality with compliments and partnership, while Shakespeare promises the subject of the sonnet immortality by unusual compliments and the authorization that she will live on as long as the sonnet continues to be read. Spenser debates with his lover, treating her as his equal, and leaves his opinion open for interpretation as an modelling of poetic indirection. Shakespeares Sonnet 18 begins with the whim of an inventive mind, (Vendler, 120) a rhetorical question withdrawing if he should compare the subject of the s onnet to a Summers day. After the readers see that Shakespeare does not ask to compare her to anything else, we realize that this one proposed comparison to a Summers day is, in his mind, perfection (Vendler, 120). However, in order to truly praise the woman, he must prove that she is more lovely and more restrained by deprecating the metaphor (Vendler, 121). Though the metaphor seems sweet at first, the implied answer is no, and Shakespeare continues as to why she is not even worthy of the surmount possible metaphor (Colie, 36). His imagery of rough winds and the too hot sunbathe together with the personification of Summer (Summers lease hath every last(predicate) too short a date) support Shakespeares popular opinion that Summer is too short and unpredictable to be compa... ...87. 36-37. Felperin, Howard. Toward a Poststructuralist practise The Sonnets. Modern C Critical Interpretations Shakespeares Sonnets. Ed. Harold Bloom. 1st ed. N peeled York Chelsea House, 1987. 10 3-131. Oram, William Allan. Edmund Spenser. Ed. Arthur Kinney. New York Twayne, 1 1997. Ray, Robert H. Shakespeares Sonnet 18. The Explicator. Fall 1994 10-11. Shakespeare, William. Sonnet 18. The Norton Anthology of position Literature. E Ed. M. H. Abrams. 6th ed. New York Norton, 1996. 471. Sonnet 75 Criticism. EXPLORING Poetry. CD-ROM. Gale, 1997. Sonnet 75 Overview. EXPLORING Poetry. CD-ROM. Gale, 1997. Spenser, Edmund. Sonnet 75. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M M. H. Abrams. 6th ed. New York Norton, 1996. 415. Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeares Sonnets. Cambridge Harvard UP 1998.