Monday, February 23, 2015

What different figures of speech are in Shakespeare's Sonnet 18?I am writing a poetry analysis for my english class.

In line 3, 'Rough winds shake the darling buds of May', an attribute of a living being is assigned to the 'winds'; hence is an example of Personification.


In line 5, 'the eye of heaven' refers to the sun. It is a case of Periphrasis, a round-about image; it can also be a Metaphor, and an instance of Personification.


Line 7, 'Every fair from fair sometimes declines' is an example Hyperbaton because of the transposal of the normal grammatical order.


In line 11, there is another case of Personification for death has been imagined as a braggart or empty boaster.


In line 12, we find a Metaphor of grafting: 'When in eternal lines to time thou growest'.


In the final couplet, there is a parallelism in the form of Anaphora, because of the repetition of the words, 'so long' at the beginning of two successive lines.

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