Sample Essay On Shakespeare's Fifth Sonnet (For My Students)

The theme of Shakespeare’s 5^th Sonnet is saving time. In the poem, Shakespeare talks about how time makes beautiful things ugly. He compares growing old to the way that summer changes into winter. Though in the summer there are many beautiful flowers, in the winter all of these beautiful flowers are gone and there is “bareness every where” (8). The winter is so empty that we could almost forget there had ever been flowers at all – if we didn’t “distil” (13) the beauty of summer to make perfume. What Shakespeare means is that we need to find a way to remember being young (the summer) so that when we are older (in winter) we will still be able to remember being happy. We could do this by having children, who will look like us and make us remember who we were when we were young.

I just explained the theme of Shakespeare’s poem and summarized the poem. Now I will talk about how he communicates his theme.

First, Shakespeare uses metonymy to help us understand how beautiful we are when we are young. Instead of telling us that he is writing about a beautiful person, Shakespeare calls that person “the lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell” (2). This phrase means that whoever the beautiful person looks at cannot help but look back at the beautiful person. It shows that everybody thinks this person is beautiful, and this shows how when we are young, we are very beautiful.

Second, Shakespeare uses contrast to help us see the difference between being young and being old. He uses the contrast between summer, which is full of life and beauty, with “hideous” winter, when everything is ugly, “bare” (8), and dead. He underlines this contrast with smaller contrasts, like the contrast between “sap,” which makes us think of warmth and life, with “frost,” which makes us think of cold and death. All of these contrasts are part of a bigger contrast between beauty and ugliness, life and death. By developing this bigger contrast, Shakespeare helps us to see that we will not be young forever and that someday we will no longer be beautiful.

Finally, Shakespeare uses the metaphor of perfume to show how we can save our beauty. Shakespeare calls perfume “a liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass” (10). The “liquid” makes us think of the “sap” from the summer. In fact, Shakespeare calls perfume “summer’s distillation” (9), which means that perfume is the essence or most important part of summer. This shows us that by making perfume, we have captured the most important part of summer. We also see this idea in the word “prisoner”. This metaphor not only shows us an interesting connection between perfume and summer, but is a powerful symbol for what Shakespeare wants us to do: he wants us to find a way to capture the beauty of our own lives, just like perfume captures the beauty of summer.

In conclusion, I have shown that the theme of Shakespeare’s poem is saving beauty, and I have explained how Shakespeare uses metonymy, contrast, and metaphor to develop this idea. In fact, Shakespeare wrote this poem to encourage his friend to have a child while he was still young – but reading this poem makes us think about the best ways to remember our own youth and challenges us to carpe diem – seize the day!