Thy eternal summer will not fade - an English tutor's guide to hyperbole

Towards the end of Shakespeare’s famous sonnet beginning “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”, he writes:

“But thy eternal summer will not fade”

This is a wonderful example of hyperbole – the use of literary exaggeration.

Why do you think he uses this exaggeration: “thy eternal summer”?

No one is at their best all the time, even in a single day, let alone for the whole of their life!

But this is a love poem – even the form Shakespeare uses, the 14 line sonnet, was already well established by Shakespeare’s time as the fashionable way to write about love (there are love sonnets in his famous play Romeo and Juliet).

And he uses hyperbole to show how much he loves the person he is writing the sonnet for (no one really knows for sure who this person was, or even if there was a real person at all!).  So you could write:

Shakespeare uses hyperbole in the line “But thy eternal summer will not fade” to show how he thinks the beauty of his beloved will last for ever because it is so amazing.  It is beyond even the laws of nature.

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