Univeristy of Wisconsin-Green Bay
Univeristy of Wisconsin-Green Bay

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Sonnets of Shakespeare and Pablo Neruda

By

shafma18

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Pablo Neruda’s “One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII” has the speaker comparing their light of their love to “the plant that doesn’t bloom, but carries the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,” (Neruda 5-6). This can be compared to Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”, in which his love is compared to “a summer’s day” and being “more lovely and more temperate.” (Shakespeare 1-2) Both of these poems compare the speaker’s love to lovely things, like flowers or a summer day. However, while Neruda writes how his love’s beauty comes from within, Shakespeare writes how her love exceeds the beauty she is compared to.

This imagery of flowers especially is a common point of both Neruda’s and Shakespeare’s sonnets. Neruda uses them as not only a metaphor for his love’s inner beauty but also mentions how she cannot be compared to “an arrow of carnations that propagate fire” (Neruda 2). Shakespeare instead uses them to compare the longevity of his love’s beauty to the summer day he compared her to, as he writes, “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer’s lease hath all too short a date,” (Shakespeare 3-4) and “But thy eternal summer shall not fade.” (Shakespeare 9)

Both sonnets make use of repetition, especially in the latter half of each poem. Neruda repeats the phrase “I love you” five times throughout the poem, as that phrase is the most important to carry the message of his love. (Neruda 3, 5, 9-11) Shakespeare’s signature pattern of iambic pentameter is fully on display in his sonnet, andthe poem is rounded off by the repetition of the phrase “So long” to drive home how eternal his love’s beauty is. (Shakespeare 13-14)

Works Cited:

Neruda, Pablo. “One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII.” Poetry Foundation, 2014, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49236/one-hundred-love-sonnets-xvii.

Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” Poetry Foundation, 1609, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45087/sonnet-18-shall-i-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day.