Comparison between William Shakespeare's Sonnet #18 and Archilochus's #12

William Shakespeare's Sonnet #18 section

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.

Archilochus's #12 section 

She rejoiced, holding a branch of myrtle and the rose-tree’s lovely flower...

   and her hair

shadowed her shoulders and her back.

Though Shakespeare and Archilochus lived hunderds of years apart, both poets explored similar topics. Here, the poets use flowers to describe love’s universal theme.

In Shakespeare’s sonnet, he compares his lover to the seasons. He begins with spring, a time when most flowers bloom. After a harsh winter, the first sign of the spring's warmth are the tenacious flower buds, which poke up from the snowy earth. It seems that the fragile things would never survive yet yearly flowers bloom. Furthermore, a budding flower has not had enough time to become marred by insects or climate. Buds exist in their earliest and purist form. By comparing his lover to the "darling buds of May" Shakespeare, mirrors his lover's purity, beauty, and resiliency to that of the bud. Just as a budding may flower must cut through the snow of a harsh winter, so too does his lover's beauty and purity slice through loneliness and grant him happiness. Through the flower imagery, Shakespeare parallels the flower's tenacious survival capacity to his love's endurance.  Archilochus similarly employs flower symbolism to invoke his love. Initially he sites a woman holding “ a branch of myrtle and the rose-tree’s lovely flower”. Both the myrtle and rose symbolize love. Thus, early in the poem, Archilochus alerts the reader to the type of poem being read. The tone of the poem would become drastically altered if he had instead said “ She rejoiced, holding a branch of olive”. Through the myrtle and rose, the reader understands that this poem describes a lover rather than an ordinary woman. Furthermore, by having this woman hold the flower, he alludes to the fact that she mirrors the alluring and beautiful traits of the flowers. Just as one possesses something in their hand, so too does his lover possess the flowers’ loveliness.