Deconstructive reading of the sonnet 18

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Sonnet 18 . Shall I compare thee to the summer's day.

In the sonnet, the speaker asks whether he should compare the young man to a summer's day, but notes that the young man has qualities that surpass a summer's day. He also notes the qualities of a summer day are subject to change and will eventually diminish. The speaker then states that the young man will live forever in the lines of the poem, as long as it can be read. There is an irony being expressed in this sonnet: it is not the actual young man who will be externalized, but the description of him contained in the poem, and the poem contains scant or no description of the young man, but instead contains vivid and lasting descriptions of a summer day; which the young man is supposed to outlive.

Deconstruction  and Derrida

Deconstruction, form of philosophical and literary analysis, derived mainly from work begun in the 1960 by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, that questions the fundamental conceptual distinctions, or “oppositions,” in Western philosophy through a close examination of the language and logic of philosophical and literary texts. In the 1970s the term was applied to work by Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hill's Miller, and Barbara Johnson, among other scholars. In the 1980s it designated more loosely a range of radical theoretical enterprises in diverse areas of the humanities and social sciences, including—in addition to philosophy and literature—law, psychoanalysis, architecture, anthropology, theology, feminism, gay and lesbian studies, political theory, historiography, and film theory. In polemical discussions about intellectual trends of the late 20th-century, deconstruction was sometimes used pejoratively to suggest nihilism and frivolous skepticism. In popular usage the term has come to mean a critical dismantling of tradition and traditional modes of thought

To deconstruct is to take a text apart along the structural “fault lines” created by the ambiguities inherent in one or more of its key concepts or themes in order to reveal the equivocations or contradictions that make the text possible.

Deconstruction Derrida very famously said that language bars within itself the necessity of its own critic. Around this concept is very interesting to read poems and as well as literature to see how criticism of that language happens and in that the meaning is desegregating them. Along with this we know that the Deridian idea  of deconstructive ideas revolves around free play. Let’s call undecidable of meaning. Very famously it revolves around the idea of binary and oppositions at the same time we see very interesting in the play about hegemony and subjectivity. In this poem we can see how this all operates. 

Deconstructive reading of the sonnet : Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day.

This is small poem sonnet written by William Shakespeare and we try to see how this all operates. How we can see language bars  , binary oppression and subjectivity in this poem. 

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day 

What is the binary of the poem? What is the binary underplaying in this part? For example compare thee this thee is the beloved. As we know this poem is addressed to a beloved. The speaker is a lover. Beloved is a thee and what is binary against that is a summer’s day. 

When we generalize the beloved what we find that the beloved represents human beings and to do summer’s day represents nature. 

When we are trying to see the language bar itself it is necessary to criticize what we see in the very first line of the poem or subsequent line. 

"Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed;"

What we find is that this poem is of a decent nature. Initially people find that it is a nature poem but it is not a nature poem. Nature is its own under privilege site of binary and what the centre is beloved, human beings are represented and nature is replicated on the periphery of this descent. 

"But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owl’s,

Nor shall death brag thou wand ‘rest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st.

 So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

 So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."

When will that happen that the beloved became more central than the summer’s day. Which is a fading away which is changing which trajectory subsequently. When will beloved the human beings hear will have eternity and immortality. When there are lines written on the beauty of the beloved the lines are let us say writing or poem or sonnet. So actually the poem celebrates beloved human beings here by dedicating nature on the periphery. But when we read beloved will achieve immortality or internal beauty only when conditions of that line are written about that when writing happens when poem or sonnet is not that what we find ultimately is that the poem celebrates self. 

When line or writing or poem or  the sonnet is the centre what goes the periphery is that beloved as well as summer’s day they both are on the same side now. 

This poem tries to say this beloved has attributes of nature. This poem also will give a life when this is the key to understanding the poem. Second word of this particular sonnet is poet himself or let us say lover himself. This not celebrating poem, sonnet or lines and writes it’s perhaps celebrating self and it says that if I write then the beloved will become immortal. 

It dramatizes in an interesting way power struggles. And this power struggle obviously goes with implied threats.

Citation

Deconstructive Reading of Sonnet 18. (n.d.). Retrieved July 14, 2020, from https://ed.ted.com/on/r9V6IJiO

Sonnet 18. (2020, April 02). Retrieved July 14, 2020, from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet_18

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2019, December 12). Deconstruction. Retrieved July 14, 2020, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/deconstruction