Similarities Between Shakespeare And Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Love is a universal poetic theme. William Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are two poets from different times, and they present their own views of love. They have written two sonnets to express love, which are 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' and 'How do I love thee?'. Love is demonstrated in many ways in their poems, but the way in how they express love is different from each other. Shakespeare uses imagery of summer to compare it to a woman, who is his lover to demonstrate her beauty. Elizabeth Barrett Browning explores a question in which she discovers answer herself. Both poets demonstrate love in their individual methods, and although there are many ways to express love, the meaning of love is understood and felt in …show more content…
The poem starts with a question "shall I compare thee to a summer's day?", Shakespeare uses a similar technique as Barrett Browning, by starting with a question, and then elaborating their points and reasoning.. In the first quatrain, the poet has compared her to a windy day, when he says "thou art more lovely and more temperate:" it gives us a suggestion of saying that she is better, more lovely and more calm than summer. By the colon which Shakespeare has used at the end of this line, it indicates that he will provide an explanation of the point that he made. Also the rhythm of this line creates a pause, that aloud the readers to absorb the first two lines more clearly and easier to understand the image which he is going to build after. Shakespeare uses the words "rough winds" and "summer's lease" in the third and fourth line to show the summer isn't perfect, it also has windy and bad days. The use of the word ‘lease’ reminds us of the fact that nothing will stay beautiful forever, like the flowers will not always stay blooming, it has a limited time of beauty, after that the beauty will gone. The summer is limited it would not stay forever, he has mentioned this point by saying 'and summer's lease hath all too short a date'.Linking with the first quatrain, the second quatrain, Shakespeare continues to express that summer is not good enough.As he says that 'sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, and often is his gold complexion dimm’d', Shakespeare wants to tell the readers about another negative thing about the summer. Shakespeare uses personification to compare the sun to ‘the eye of the heaven’, to show that sometimes the summer’s sun is too hot and sometimes the clouds will fade it away. In the next two lines, he throws a problem to him self, he says that 'and every fair from fair