Name______________________________
The Shakespearean Sonnet: 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.
You will be assigned to do one part at a time. Do not work ahead. With your partner:
Part One:
1.
Number each line, then break the sonnet up by placing a small line under each quatrain.
2.
Look at the last words in each line and identify the rhyme scheme using the letters: a, b, c, d, e, f, g
(meaning that you will assign a letter to each line, in chronological order).
3.
Count the number of syllables in the first and second line of this sonnet.
Part Two:
4.
Break the first two lines into five sets of syllable pairs: ex. And she | as much | in love |…
5.
Put a U over the unstressed syllable and a / over the stressed syllable in each pair.
6.
Read the line out loud, putting slightly more emphasis on the stressed syllables.
7.
Count up the total syllables for each line in the remainder of the sonnet and put a star or a dot next to
any irregular lines (not ten syllables?). We will discuss them as a class.
