Sonnet 18 interpretation?

Your teacher is an idiot. Obviously he wants to impose his own reading of the poem on everyone else. I wonder if it even IS his own reading, or just something he copied down from one of his professors.

Here's what you can do. Obviously the teacher wants you to look at the sestet, beginning with "But thy eternal summer shall not fade." And he wants you to say that the "boast" is a boast about the transforming powers of his poety, its ability to make the young man (the poem is one of the ones addressed to a young man) "eternal."

Then ask him whether the "boast" is really a boast or just a kind of poetic resume from a young Shakespeare trying to gain patronage from Henry Wriothsley, Earl of Southampton (whom some critics believe to be the "young man" of the sonnets and to whom Shakespeare dedicated both "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece"). I'll bet he's never even heard of Wriothsley.

Here's where you can seriously start to have fun. The first 12 poems or so in the Sonnets are addressed to a young man, urging the young man to get married, and reproduce so that he leaves his "image" in the world. Then, around Sonnet 18, Shakespeare starts to shift strategy, and argue that what will REALLY make the young man immortal is poetry.

So you can ask your teacher whether he thinks this shift from an urge to marriage to an urge to be poetically praised function as alternative forms of reproduction--whether Shakespeare is attempting to appropriate or surpass with his poetry female reproductive powers. If you need a sonnet to refer to for the "urge to marry" part, use Sonnet 3 as an example.

Then ask him whether he thinks Shakespeare is able to maintain his belief in the power of poetry to make things last. If he says that he is, then ask him what he makes of Sonnet 72, where the speaker seems to acknowledge the power of time to destroy people and pitifully asks to be loved because he's wasting away. (He compares himself to a winter landscape, to twilight after sunset, and to a dying fire that consumes itself).

Finally, ask him whether he thinks the speaker of the sonnets has cause to boast his power when the "Dark Lady" of the sonnets seems to win in the end. Does he think the "Dark Lady" is like the force of nature returned to avenge itself on the poet who claimed to steal its powers of reproduction and reverse its laws of death? The "Dark Lady" sonnets are basically from Numbers 126 on down. Refer to Sonnet 130 ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun") as an example of how the natural power of the Dark Lady seems to triumph over poetry. And finally, to Sonnet 147, the last ("My love is like a fever") as an example of how poetry doesn't seem to help the speaker out of the desire which consumes him just like the fire of Sonnet 73.

You can google all this stuff--Shakespeare's Sonnets, Henry Wriothsley, the Dark Lady, etc.--to familiarize yourself with them. Be polite rather than combattive, but just see whether this douche of a teacher even knows what he's talking about.

Incidentally, if he's never even heard of the "young man," and tries to challenge you--not only is this a critical commonplace, but the person Shakespeare refers to in the early part of the sonnets is IDENTIFIED as a man several times--most notably Sonnet 3, lines 4-6, which quite clearly refer to a man.

Do this, and you'll have a sweet revenge for a teacher who seems more interested in furthering his own ideas than allowing you to make yours. Like I said, be polite, but ask him these questions, and see if he has any answers.

Oh, and let me know what happens!

I might be about or from a person discovering his inner being and realizing it as his true existence which has a symbiotic relationship with the physical functions.

Peace.