Quiz

Sonnet 18

William Shakespeare

1. 1. What is the overall form of 'Sonnet 18'?

   A Petrarchan sonnet with an octave and a sestetA Shakespearean sonnet with three quatrains and a coupletA Spenserian sonnet with interlocking rhyme throughoutA free-verse meditation with fourteen irregular lines

2. 2. What is the primary purpose of the closing couplet, 'So long lives this, and this gives life to thee'?

   To apologize for comparing the beloved to something fleetingTo assert that the poem itself will immortalize the belovedTo claim that summer is ultimately superior to the belovedTo shift focus from the beloved to the poet's own mortality

3. 3. In the line 'the eye of heaven shines,' what figure of speech is being used?

   Personification of the beloved's eyesMetaphor referring to the sunSimile comparing heaven to a human faceAlliteration linking heaven and heat

4. 4. Which flaw of summer does the speaker NOT explicitly mention in the poem?

   Its winds are too roughIts heat is sometimes excessiveIts days grow progressively shorter toward winterIts duration is too brief

5. 5. What does the phrase 'summer's lease hath all too short a date' convey?

   Summer's property rights are disputed by autumnSummer lasts only a limited, fleeting timeThe beloved's beauty will expire like a legal contractThe calendar date of midsummer is too warm

6. 6. How does the speaker characterize the beloved in contrast to summer?

   More passionate and volatile than summerMore lovely and more temperate than summerMore mysterious and harder to understandEqually beautiful but more melancholy

7. 7. What is the dominant tone of the poem's final six lines (lines 9–14)?

   Melancholic resignation about the passage of timeConfident and celebratory about the power of verseBitter toward death and the forces of natureDoubtful and questioning about immortality

8. 8. The word 'untrimm'd' at the end of line 8 most nearly means:

   Left undecorated and plainStripped of its beauty or order by natureCarefully pruned by a gardenerDeliberately understated in style

9. 9. To what literary tradition does the poem's opening rhetorical question most clearly belong?

   The blazon, cataloguing a beloved's physical featuresThe carpe diem tradition urging the beloved to seize the dayThe Petrarchan conceit of comparing a beloved to natural beautyThe elegy, lamenting a death through nature imagery

10. 10. Which best describes the volta, or turn, in this sonnet?

    It occurs at line 5, when the speaker begins criticizing the sunIt occurs at line 9, when the speaker shifts from summer's faults to the beloved's eternal qualityIt occurs at the couplet, when death is mentioned for the first timeIt occurs at line 3, when rough winds are introduced as a contrast
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