Getting to Know Shakespeare in Huia 1

Our Intermediate Team are learning about sonnets as part of a competition for New Zealand school children to write their own sonnets.

In Huia 1, we started by looking at one of the most well known of William Shakespeare's sonnets, called Sonnet 18, but better known as "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"

Monday: First, all we had to do was look at it for five minutes and make any comments about anything we thought was interesting.

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 owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee


Things we noticed about Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare:

• He starts with a question
• "thee" in the middle of the first line rhymes with "lovely" in the middle of the second line
• In the last two lines "can" and "and" rhyme in the middle of their lines
• He does not say who "thee" is
• He refers to the seasons and weather
• It is really hard to understand
• It is more complicated than any other poem we have studied
• He talks about changing
• He is obviously in love with a woman because you would not compare a guy to summer's day
• He starts with a question in the first line and then answers it in the second line
• Every second line rhymes except the last two which rhyme with each other
• Every line starts with a capital letter
• There is punctuation at the end of every line except one
• It's olden day English from the 1600s
• Isn't Shakespeare a famous poet?

This is a facsimile of the original printing of Sonnet 18.

Tuesday: We looked at a You Tube video of David Gilmour (of Pink Floyd) sing a version of

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day. Then we looked at some of the numbers involved in the sonnet.

We discovered - and found examples in Sonnet 18 - that Shakespeare's sonnets:

• have fourteen lines
• have three quatrains plus a couplet - and we discovered that there's a bit of Maths in this because (3 x 3 quatrains)+(1 x 1 couplet) = (3 x 4)+(1 x 2)=14
• have a rhyme scheme of abab, cdcd, efef, gg
• are written in iambic pentameter which means each line has five beats (or feet)
  eg.Shall I compare thee to a summer's day

Here's another version of the poem on You Tube.

And another one, this time animated....

and this one which is a modern day version of the poem which helps make it a bit easier to understand, but.... do you think it maintains the sonnet form?