SONNET 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Title: I think it's just referring to how many he had written. The title doesn't say that much.
Paraphrase: Shakespeare begins by comparing "thee" to a summers day, he then goes on to say how summer isn't that great and I get the sense that he's trying to say all beauty fades eventually. The author is saying how the "prime" years aren't going to last forever. In the end Shakespeare is saying how as long as humans exist his poem will still be accurate.
Connotation: Personification is used in line 4 when the author is talking about summer and winter as if they were real people. He's hinting that summer is a temporary thing whereas winter is more permanent. Summer is used as a metaphor to describe his"beloved" it helps the reader relate by using something so common as summer to describe his point. In line 1 Shakespeare uses a rhetorical question to get the reader thinking.
Tone: The tone of the poem is arrogance. The speaker is acting as if he has the upper hand, as if he's informing us of something that we don't already know
Shift: The poem shifts when the speaker starts talking about how summer actually isn't that great. It makes the reader stop because we thought the speaker was just saying how great summer is.