Question

“sonnet 18”
shall i compare thee to a summer’s day?
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 dimm’d,
and every fair from fair sometime declines,
by chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:
but thy eternal summer shall not fade,
nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
nor shall death brag thou wander’st 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.
ms. jameson is using “sonnet 18” by william shakespeare to teach her students how to analyze a rhyme scheme.
so long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
so long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
which is the correct rhyme scheme for these lines?
ab aa
aaa ab

Explanation:

To determine the rhyme scheme, we analyze the end - words of the two lines: "see" and "thee". These two words rhyme. In rhyme scheme notation, when two lines rhyme, we use the same letter (usually lowercase or uppercase, but here the option with "aa" is appropriate as both lines have rhyming end - words. The first line ends with "see" and the second with "thee", so they form a rhyming pair, which is represented by "aa" as both lines have the same rhyme sound.

Answer:

aa