Episode 130 Study Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 With Me!
Emma's ESL English - A podcast by Emma - Tuesdays

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In today's podcast we're studying Shakespeare's most famous sonnet, Sonnet 18 to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday on the 23rd. In this poem Shakespeare tries to tell his lover how much more beautiful than a summer's day they are and how he has immortalised them, how they will now live forever in this poem. This poem is construct using a rhyme scheme called 'iambic pentameter'. This is a complicated scheme to use as it requires on/off stress throughout. Similar to a Haiku it has a rigid structure, always following the same rhyme, the same number of lines and the same structure of 14 lines. Shakespeare is perhaps the most famous poet to use this structure because of the vast number of sonnets he wrote (154). He also often used iambic pentameter in his plays too. Check out this video of Patrick Stewart (he of Star Trek Next Generation and Picard) reading this poem as part of a series he did through the pandemic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYnj7ZutTgI You can find a copy of the poem at the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45087/sonnet-18-shall-i-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 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. I hope you enjoy this episode. Additional Vocabulary English has a vast wealth of poetry - a large amount they have to stick by the rules - idiom - to follow the rules rhyme -two words that share a similar sound couplets - two lines of poetry probably do a darn site better than I do - 'darn site' is a slang term often used in place of swear words in the UK and means 'a lot' or 'extremely'. we're looking 25 degrees tops - casual language 'tops' is a British slang term that means 'the most' of something, in this case 25 degrees is the hottest it's likely to get. From the poem Temperate - just means mild Hath - Old word has = hath. Gold complexion dimmed - 'dimmed' means to be less bright so this just means the sun is less bright because of clouds covering it Untrimmed - in this case unlimited Thy, Thou and Thee - are all old words meaning 'you' Ow'st - old English word that means own or possess