Poem Connection to an In-Class Poem

Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare and The Road Not Taken by Rob Frost

Sonnet 18 – 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.

The Road Not Taken-Rob Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

By: Akshara George, Rafia Sethi, Abrielle Noronha, Mahnoor Khan, Masooma Hussain

         An extended metaphor is the comparison between two different things that continues throughout the writing. Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 is a classic example of an extended metaphor. The poem's opening sentence starts with “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?” Here he is trying to compare his lover to a summer's day, in other words he is trying to make her feel special and as pleasant as 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:”  In this quotation, he is stating that his lover is the most beautiful woman and life will have ‘rough winds’ temper it and that summer is short. Shakespeare compares his lover with the seasons; when he says the line, “And summer's lease hath all too short a date:”. He implies that his lover is not immortal however “But thy eternal summer shall not fade” that she will forever be alive for him.

The poem read in class ‘The road not taken’ is also a classic example of an extended metaphor. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”, the fork in the road represents a metaphor for a choice that has to be made in life; the choice to conform or the choice to not conform. The speaker has come to a time in his life where he has to make a decision to take one path and abandon the other. Both of these poems are about two completely different themes but what makes them similar is the fact that they both are full of metaphors and that they both are  extended metaphors. Both the poems create an ambiguous feeling,when the poems state the vehicle but leave the tenor unknown. Sonnet 18’s tenor is left ambiguous because when he says, “Thou art more lovely” he has left the reader to believe what they want to believe whom ‘Thou’ is. The road not taken is ambiguous because of the fact that the speaker does not take the road usually taken.