Sonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?

Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

                BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

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 the.

ANALYSIS OF SONNET 18 LINE BY LINE 

Sonnet 18 is devoted to praising a friend or lover, traditionally known as the 'fair youth', the sonnet itself a guarantee that this person's beauty will be sustained. Even death will be silenced because the lines of verse will be read by future generations, when speaker and poet and lover are no more, keeping the fair image alive through the power of verse.

The opening line is almost a tease, reflecting the speaker's uncertainty as he attempts to compare his lover with a summer's day. The rhetorical question is posed for both speaker and reader and even the metrical stance of this first line is open to conjecture. Is it pure iambic pentameter? This comparison will not be straightforward.

This image of the perfect English summer's day is then surpassed as the second line reveals that the lover is more lovely and more temperate. Lovely is still quite commonly used in England and carries the same meaning (attractive, nice, beautiful) whilst temperate in Shakespeare's time meant gentle-natured, restrained, moderate and composed.

The second line refers directly to the lover with the use of the second person pronoun Thou, now archaic. As the sonnet progresses, however, lines 3 - 8 concentrate on the ups and downs of the weather, and are distanced, taken along on a steady iambic rhythm (except for line 5, see later).

Summertime in England is a hit and miss affair weather-wise. Winds blow, rain clouds gather and before you know where you are, summer has come and gone in a week. The season seems all too short - that's true for today as it was in Shakespeare's time - and people tend to moan when it's too hot, and grumble when it's overcast.

The speaker is suggesting that for most people, summer will pass all too quickly and they will grow old, as is natural, their beauty fading with the passing of the season.

Lines 9 - 12 turn the argument for ageing on its head. The speaker states with a renewed assurance that 'thy eternal summer shall not fade' and that his lover shall stay fair and even cheat death and Time by becoming eternal.

Lines 13 - 14 reinforce the idea that the speaker's (the poet's) poem will guarantee the lover remain young, the written word becoming breath, vital energy, ensuring life continues.

SUMMARY

One of Shakespeare's most famous sonnets, "Sonnet 18" is one of the first 126 sonnets in the cycle, all of which are addressed to an unknown figure known by scholars as to the Fair Youth. In this poem, the speaker asks whether he should compare his beloved to a summer's day. Ultimately, however, he rejects the comparison and goes on to explain that this is because his beloved is "more lovely" and also because summer lasts only a brief time.

The speaker goes on to identify other things about summer which might be disliked, such as the fact that the sun sometimes shines too hot, and sometimes the "gold complexion" of the sun is "dimm'd" by bad weather. Eventually, too, the "fair" of summer will decline. 

By comparison, the speaker says that the "eternal summer" of his beloved will never end—his beloved will never lose his beauty, and that beauty will never succumb to Death. The reason for this is that the poem itself, the "eternal lines" committed to paper by the poet, will stand as a monument to the beloved and his beauty. For as long as men are alive and still reading the lines the poet has written, it "gives life" to the beloved and he will be immortal.

SONNET 18 LANGUAGE AND TONE

Note the use of the verb shall and the different tone it brings to separate lines. In the first line it refers to the uncertainty the speaker feels. Inline nine there is the sense of some kind of definite promise, whilst line eleven conveys the idea of command for death to remain silent.

The word beauty does not appear in this sonnet. Both summer and fair are used instead.

Thou, thee and thy are used throughout and refer directly to the lover, the fair youth.

And/Nor/So long repeat, reinforce.