Love in Shakespeare's Sonnets

            In poems there are 3 more popular theme concepts that writers used to express a point. These three themes being Love, Death, and Time. The theme Love can be interpreted in various ways and can be linked to Time and Death. For example, the love for time and how important it is to a specific person/thing or how love can lead to death of someone or something. Around the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century men usually wrote poems dealing with love between two people. These two people either loving each other or how their love has disappeared. Within these poems writers sometimes uses aspects of nature or the world to drive their point. William Shakespeare was a master at incorporating love in his sonnets. I will discuss the theme concept of Love in "Sonnet 18", "Sonnet 116", and "Sonnet 109." .
             In the "Sonnet 18" the speaker uses love in a sense of a person describing the long lasting beauty in another person, perhaps their significant other. The speaker uses descriptions of nature and images in order to show the beauty of this particular person. In the first quatrain he begins his comparison between this person and nature by comparing them to a summer day. In the second line, "Thou art lovely and more temperate", he is saying that this person is lovelier and gentler than a summer day (Shakespeare). A summer day usually has the implications of something being beautiful and fitting. He continues on to talk about certain features of a typical summer day. "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines and often is his gold complexion dimmed;" (Shakespeare). This quote explains how nature is not always perfect by saying the sun is sometimes too hot and often times the clouds cover to sky causing that gold complexion to be dimmed. He later explains that this person beauty will never go away, characterized as them being an "eternal summer" (Shakespeare).