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
ab
aaa
aa

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, lines with the same rhyme are given the same letter (in lowercase if the case is consistent, or uppercase, but here the matching rhyme - ending lines should have the same letter. Since "see" and "thee" rhyme, the rhyme scheme for these two lines is "aa" (or "AA" depending on case, but the option with lowercase "aa" is present). The other options: "AB" implies two different rhymes, "ab" also implies different rhymes, and "AAA" would require three lines with the same rhyme, but we only have two lines here.

Answer:

aa