Sunday, December 9, 2012

In Shakespeare's sonnet 18, what kind of figure of speech is used in the line "Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade"?

In Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, the narrator tells his beloved
that she will live forever if her description is written in "eternal lines" of
poetry:



Nor
shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,


When in
eternal lines to time thou
growest



These lines use two
types of figurative language: personification and
metaphor.


Personification
is when human qualities are assigned to inanimate beings or objects.  In this case,
"Death" is not a person, but the poet talks about it as if it were a person who can brag
and who casts a shadow when he stands in front of the
sun.


Metaphor is a comparison that
does not use the words like or as.  Here the
poet compares someone who is going to die to someone who wanders in the shade of
death.


It is not surprising that personification and
metaphor are used in the same phrase, because personification really is nothing more
than a specific type of metaphor.  For example, when we say "The sun was smiling down on
the children in the park," we are actually making a comparison; we are saying that the
sun was smiling at the children in the park the way a person would smile at
them.

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