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.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was a playwright, poet and actor from Stratford-upon-Avon, England who today is best known for his plays, of which he wrote an astounding 38. However, he also wrote many poems – 154 of which were sonnets, poems which are always fourteen lines long and often take the subject of love as their focus. In Sonnet 18 Shakespeare is speaking to a lover of his (though probably not the same lover which he speaks to later on in Sonnet 130, since he seems to find his love in Sonnet 18 quite attractive).
He starts off by asking the above rhetorical question, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Due to the conventions of love poetry, we expect that Shakespeare will then proceed to make this comparison and thus show how attractive he finds his love. However, like in Sonnet 130, he decides not to make such a clichéd comparison, but not because he thinks his love is actually unattractive, as in Sonnet 130. He says, “Though art more lovely and more temperate” – suggesting that in fact she (or is it he?) is in fact more pleasant than summer, which is further cemented by his pointing out the not so good things about summer.
On the third line he points out that in May, at the start of summer, it is very windy, then on the fourth line he anthropomorphises the season (treats it as human), saying its “lease hath too short a date”; that it passes too quickly. He also implies in line five that summer can also be too hot, calling the sun “the eye of heaven”, and on line six he personifies the sun, saying that too frequently his “gold complexion” is dimmed by clouds, turning a bright summer day to a dull grey.
By contrast, on line nine, Shakespeare writes to his love, “thy eternal summer shall never fade”, the following lines stating also that unlike summer their beauty shall not fade and that even death with not bring about their end. Why is this the case? Well, it is made clear in the couplet which ends the sonnet: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” Shakespeare suggests that they will be made immortal by the sonnet itself, since their beauty will remain forever in the minds of those who read it, from generation to generation.
Image: By Cropped from original by current uploader. License as before. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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