Sonnet 18
Sonnet 18
by William Shakespeare

Sonnet 18 Themes

Little Words, Big Ideas

Love

Sonnet 18 opens up looking an awful lot like a traditional love poem, but by the end it’s pretty clear that the poet is much more into himself and the poetry he produces than the beloved he&#...

Literature and Writing

Like much of Shakespeare’s work, Sonnet 18 is all about writing and expressing one’s self through language. This is, at its clearest, a poem about the power of the written word over dea...

Time

The speaker of Sonnet 18 is absolutely fixated on fate and mortality, but believes he’s come up with an effective time machine: poetry. Instead of contemplating a beautiful summer’s day...

Man and the Natural World

On one level, Sonnet 18 is clearly concerned with the relationship between man and the eventual, inescapable death he’ll encounter in nature. On another level, the poet also seems fascinated...