Shakespearean Sonnet: the second major type of sonnet, the Shakespearean, or English sonnet, follows a different set of rules. Here, four quatrains and a couplet follow this rhyme scheme: abab, cdcd, efef, gg. The couplet plays a pivotal role, usually arriving in the form of a conclusion, amplification, or even refutation of the previous three stanzas, often creating an epiphanic quality to the end.

Shakespeare’s eighteenth sonnet is, perhaps, one of the best-known sonnets contained in the English literary canon. It is a conventional Shakespearean sonnet that explores conventional themes in an original way. With characteristic skill Shakespeare uses the sonnet to exalt poetry and his beloved. The first quatrain introduces the primary conceit of the sonnet, the comparison of the speaker’s beloved to a summer’s day. In the first line the speaker introduces the comparison of his beloved to a summer’s day. The speaker then builds on this comparison when he writes, “thou art more lovely and more temperate” (2) because he is describing his beloved in a way that could also describe summer. When he describes “rough winds that do shake the darling buds of May,” (3) he is using rough winds as a metaphor for capricious chance and change, and he implies that his beloved does not suffer from these winds as summer does. The first quatrain, therefore, introduces a comparison that is expanded upon by the remaining two quatrains. The second quatrain strengthens the comparison of the beloved to a summer’s day. The speaker anthropomorphizes the sky, or “heaven,” (5) by using the metaphor of an “eye,” the speaker invokes the image of his beloved’s eyes.  Similarly, in the next line when the speaker mentions that summer’s “gold complexion” is often “dimmed” (6) he is attempting to compare another human attribute of his beloved with some trait of summer. The second quatrain presents summer as possessing only mutable beauty. The third quatrain no longer focuses on the mutability of summer, but it speaks of  the nearly eternal nature of the memory of the beloved when the speaker assures his beloved that her “eternal summer shall not fade,”(9) he is using summer as a metaphor for her beauty. Using the word “fade” facilitates the comparison of the abstract notion of a summer’s day to the concrete person of the beloved because fading is a quality of light. Similarly, when the speaker writes of the beloved entering the “shade” (10) of death, he is expanding on the use of the metaphor and reinforcing the poem’s primary conceit. When the speaker boasts that his beloved will not suffer the same fate as a summer’s day because he has committed her to “eternal lines,” (12) he adds the theme of poetry itself to a sonnet that had previously been a love poem. Shakespeare gives his beloved immortality through poetry that God did not give to a summer’s day. The couplet concludes the sonnet by tying together the themes of love and poetry. In it the speaker starkly contrasts the life spans of his poem and his beloved’s memory to the fleeting nature of a summer’s day. He boasts that, unlike a summer’s day, his poetry and the memory of  his beloved will last “so long as men can breathe or eyes can see” (13). This last comparison provides a stark contrast to the time period, “a summer’s day,” (1) introduced at the beginning and exalts poetry along with the beloved. Shakespeare used a conventional form of poetry to praise poetry and his beloved. He boasted that both would be preserved nearly eternally. Five hundred years later, no one refutes his boast.