Beauty, irrefutably, is a common theme in all Shakespearean sonnets. Generally, Shakespeare's love of beauty is expressed in relation to a person or an undefined muse. Nowhere is the beauty of Shakespeare's muse expressed more strongly than throughout his Sonnet 18. In homage to the magnificence of his muse's beauty, which is described as more glorious than even the seasons of nature, Shakespeare makes a point of completing this beauty by preserving and immortalizing it. through the lines of Sonnet 18.Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Before Shakespeare's muse or the beauty of "the Dark Lady" can be immortalized, her greatness must first be fully understood. Shakespeare wastes no time in undertaking the task of conveying this beauty, and does so strategically through his first line, which he phrases in the form of a question. “Should I compare you to a summer’s day?” It is clear that answering this question will be the purpose of the Sonnet, and Shakespeare begins to do so immediately, with line 2: "Thou art fairest and most temperate." This line not only answers the question posed by line 1, but begins to set out the theme of the poem: Shakespeare's Dark Lady is indeed more beautiful and magnificent than the seasons, namely summer. This theme also represents the thesis of the dialectical rhetorical form of the poem. Lines 3 and 4 continue in this vein of thought, as Shakespeare describes the month of May as having "strong winds" and the "summer's lease" as being "too short." The words "crude" and "short" have specific negative connotations, demonstrating that Shakespeare is moving away from presenting summer as being as pleasant or beautiful as his muse, and instead tends to present his muse in a more favorable. Following this model, lines 5 and 6 directly refer to the summer sun, or "the eye of heaven", as sometimes being "too hot", or often as having "its golden complexion muted". It is no coincidence that Shakespeare chose the words “dim” and “too hot” – which have relatively opposite denotations – to describe the sun. The sun, for Shakespeare, as this remarkable diction implies, is very incoherent. Shakespeare suggests that he is too often either in one unpleasant extreme or another. It is this thought of inconsistency that guides the reader through Shakespeare's next two lines. Line 7 states that “every fairground sometimes declines; ” which means that everything that is beautiful, or “right,” will eventually fall, or “decline,” from its beauty. By comparing his muse with the summer season, Shakespeare implies that both are beautiful, whether his Dark Lady is the more beautiful or not. Basically, through lines 7 and 8, Shakespeare emphasizes the fact that no beauty is eternal; and now that neither the beauty of the seasons nor the beauty of his muse can last. This thought presents the antithesis of the dialectical form of the Sonnet: if Shakespeare's Black Lady is more beautiful and magnificent than the seasons, how is it possible that they both suffer "by...the changing course of the nature”, a decline in their beauty? this is not possible, and this is the reason why Shakespeare chooses to complement the beauty of his Black Lady with the immortality which is born from the lines of her verses. Shakespeare begins to introduce this immortality – the synthesis of the dialectical form of the Sonnet – in line 9, at the same time creating the poem's volta, or dramatic change of tone. The tone shifts from someone who speaks of beauty as something that will “decline,” to someone who speaks of beauty as a “summer.”.