William Shakespeare’s well-distinguished sonnet 18 beginning with “
shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” is usually dubbed the bridge between
his “procreation group” and “young man group.” Some critics even went
further to say that in encouraging the particular young man to have a child in
order to preserve his beauty, Shakespeare, a possible homosexual, fell in
love with the young man. However, this claim is not without its controversy.
Actually, the sonnets by William Shakespeare, let alone the question
concerning who William Shakespeare really was, breed ambiguity in their order.
Not even knowing who composed or edited those masterpieces, we can under no
circumstances make sure the correct order of the poems. To put it differently,
categorization and following analyses based on either the order or the groups
of the sonnets are incredible.
On the other hand, one can hardly study this sonnet without associating
it with “A Carcass,” an appalling poem written by Charles Baudelaire. Under
the guise of the “carpe diem” theme, the poem demonstrates the superiority
of the poet because only he could preserve the beauty of the subject even when
she someday passed away and rutted like the carcass they saw. Furthermore,
while traditional Petrarchan sonnets do detail the beauty of the subjects with
their language, Baudelaire’s poem does not achieve the same goal. Through
his terrifying description of the rotten corpse, only the poet is kept alive.
It is always about himself and a double experience of himself. In his
construction of self, the poem, similar to Shakespeare’s sonnet, is a
demonstration of both egoism and auto-affection of the poet.