"Sonnet 18" by Shakespeare begins with a doubtful question. The speaker is wondering whether or not he should compare his love to a summer's day, which is temperate in weather. Usually, in a Shakespearean sonnet, he does not refer to his lover as "thee", so he deliberately put that in there to have it relate to the readers. The rhythm of iambic pentameter is evident in this poem because every other syllable is stressed. Starting from line 3, Shakespeare uses personification. It seems as if he is talking badly about summer because he is blaming the strong winds of summer to "shake the darling buds of May." He describes summer in a terminal way, like summer has a time stamp and has to come to an end by the end of the season, even though the season happens every year. He seems ignorant to the fact that summer does not just happen once in a lifetime; it happens once a year. The rest of the poem seems to be taking a turn for the worse, only talking about the negatives of summer.
      The speaker complains about how the sun is too hot, but then the clouds cover it up sometimes. Then, he goes on to say how everything that is beautiful in life must eventually lose that beauty and charm; he's declaring that it is inevitable. He has a very pessimistic view towards life and nature in general. Summer is just imperfect in his mind. In lines 7-8, he alludes to the previous lines by saying that even summer has to come to an end; there is nothing that can be done about. Either time takes its course, or things happen by chance, but one way or another, everything has to have an ending. His syntax is quite distinct in this quatrain. He uses phrases like "eye of heaven" and "gold complexion" to describe the sun, rather than blatantly coming out and saying that he is talking about the sun. 
     The last quatrain shows the turn in this sonnet. He begins line nine with the word "but" which is the ultimate game changer. In the previous quatrains, he was complaining and criticizing summer and saying how everything had to come to an end, but in this line, he's saying that his beloved is safe from all the complaints he has made. Back in the first stanza, I mentioned how the speaker was ignorant to the fact that summer comes back around every year. Well, the speaker's ignorance was intentional because we notice that the "thee" he mentions and the "summer days" he mentions are really comparable. Both can be eternal and personified, and both technically have a time stamp for their ends, but there is a third force. This third force is poetry, and through poetry and Shakespeare's words, both his lover and the days of summer can live on. In lines 11-12, he introduces yet another personification, Death. He mentions how Death will not have the chance to claim his beloved's life because this beloved is immortal. These last two lines of the third quatrain were really confusing. I think what he is trying to say is that there really is no beloved who is a person; he wants his words to be lived on forever and wants them to be immortal. He wants the poem to be read by an audience, and that audience will in turn, make his poem and his legacy eternal and everlasting. The last two lines of the poem, the couplet, sum up the poem in its entirety. "So long lives this, and this gives life to thee" is the epitome of this poem. It is really a confusing circle. The writer is arrogant in thinking that this poem will continue to be read, and his beloved will continue to live on. Shakespeare sums up the worries that humankind faces from the strains of impermanence in a fourteen line poem.