Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
(William:1564 – 1616)
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 dimmed;
And every
fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance,
or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy
eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose
possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall
death brag thou wand’rest 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.
Modern Text
Shall I compare you to a summer day? You’re lovelier and
milder. Rough winds shake the pretty buds of May, and summer doesn’t last
nearly long enough. Sometimes the sun shines too hot, and often its golden face
is darkened by clouds. And everything beautiful stops being beautiful, either
by accident or simply in the course of nature. But your eternal summer will
never fade, nor will you lose possession of your beauty, nor shall death brag
that you are wandering in the underworld, once you’re captured in my eternal
verses. As long as men are alive and have eyes with which to see, this poem
will live and keep you alive.
Summary: Sonnet 18
The speaker opens the poem with a question addressed to the
beloved: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” The next eleven lines are
devoted to such a comparison. In line 2, the
speaker stipulates what mainly differentiates the young man from the summer’s
day: he is “more lovely and more temperate.” Summer’s days tend toward
extremes: they are shaken by “rough winds”; in them, the sun (“the eye of
heaven”) often shines “too hot,” or too dim. And summer is fleeting: its date
is too short, and it leads to the withering of autumn, as “every fair from fair
sometime declines.” The final quatrain of the sonnet tells how the beloved
differs from the summer in that respect: his beauty will last forever (“Thy
eternal summer shall not fade...”) and never die. In the couplet, the speaker
explains how the beloved’s beauty will accomplish this feat, and not perish
because it is preserved in the poem, which will last forever; it will live “as
long as men can breathe or eyes can see.”
This sonnet is certainly the most famous in the sequence of Shakespeare’s
sonnets; it may be the most famous lyric poem in English. Among Shakespeare’s
works, only lines such as “To be or not to be” and “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art
thou Romeo?” are better-known. This is not to say that it is at all the best or
most interesting or most beautiful of the sonnets; but the simplicity and
loveliness of its praise of the beloved has guaranteed its place.
On the surface, the poem is simply a statement of praise about
the beauty of the beloved; summer tends to unpleasant extremes of windiness and
heat, but the beloved is always mild and temperate. Summer is incidentally
personified as the “eye of heaven” with its “gold complexion”; the imagery
throughout is simple and unaffected, with the “darling buds of May” giving way
to the “eternal summer”, which the speaker promises the beloved. The language,
too, is comparatively unadorned for the sonnets; it is not heavy with
alliteration or assonance, and nearly every line is its own self-contained
clause—almost every line ends with some punctuation, which affects a pause.
Sonnet 18 is
the first poem in the sonnets not to explicitly encourage the young man to have
children. The “procreation” sequence of the first 17 sonnets
ended with the speaker’s realization that the young man might not need children to preserve his beauty; he could
also live, the speaker writes at the end of Sonnet 17, “in
my rhyme.” Sonnet 18,
then, is the first “rhyme”—the speaker’s first attempt to preserve the young
man’s beauty for all time. An important theme of the sonnet (as it is an
important theme throughout much of the sequence) is the power of the speaker’s
poem to defy time and last forever, carrying the beauty of the beloved down to
future generations. The beloved’s “eternal summer” shall not fade precisely
because it is embodied in the sonnet: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can
see,” the speaker writes in the couplet, “So long lives this, and this gives
life to thee.”
In the sonnet,
the speaker asks whether he should compare the young man to a summer's day, but
notes that the young man has qualities that surpass a summer's day. He also
notes the qualities of a summer day are subject to change and will eventually
diminish. The speaker then states that the young man will live forever in the
lines of the poem, as long as it can be read. There is an irony being expressed
in this sonnet: it is not the actual young man who will be eternalized, but the
description of him contained in the poem, and the poem contains scant or no
description of the young man, but instead contains vivid and lasting
descriptions of a summer day; which the young man is supposed to outlive
Sonnet 18 is a typical English or Shakespearean sonnet,
having 14 lines of iambic pentameter:
three quatrains followed
by a couplet.
It also has the characteristic rhyme scheme: abab cdcd efef gg. The
poem reflects the rhetorical tradition of an Italian or Petrarchan Sonnet.
Petrarchan sonnets typically discussed the love and beauty of a beloved, often
an unattainable love, but not always. It also contains a volta, or shift in the poem's subject
matter, beginning with the third quatrain.[5]
The couplet's first line exemplifies a regular iambic
pentameter rhythm:
× / × / × / × / × /
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, (18.13)
/
= ictus, a metrically strong syllabic position. × = nonictus.
The poem is part of
the Fair Youth sequence (which comprises sonnets 1–126 in the accepted
numbering stemming from the first edition in 1609). It is also the first of the
cycle after the opening sequence now described as the procreation sonnets. Some scholars, however,
contend that it is part of the procreation sonnets, as it addresses the idea of
reaching eternal life through the written word, a theme they find in sonnets 15–17. In
this view, it can be seen as part of a transition to sonnet 20's
time theme.
"Complexion"
in line six, can have two meanings:
·
(1)The outward appearance of the face as
compared with the sun ("the eye of heaven") in the previous line, or
In Shakespeare's time "complexion" carried both
outward and inward meanings, as did the word "temperate" (externally,
a weather condition; internally, a balance of humours). The second meaning of
"complexion" would communicate that the beloved's inner, cheerful,
and temperate disposition is constant, unlike the sun, which may be blotted out
on a cloudy day. The first meaning is more obvious: a negative change in his
outward appearance.
The word, "untrimmed" in line eight, can be taken
two ways: First, in the sense of loss of decoration and frills, and second, in
the sense of untrimmed sails on a ship.In the first interpretation, the poem
reads that beautiful things naturally lose their fanciness over time. In the
second, it reads that nature is a ship with sails not adjusted to wind changes
in order to correct course. This, in combination with the words "nature's
changing course", creates an oxymoron: the unchanging change of nature, or
the fact that the only thing that does not change is change. This line in the
poem creates a shift from the mutability of the first eight lines, into the
eternity of the last six. Both change and eternity are then acknowledged and
challenged by the final line.
"Ow'st" in line ten can carry two meanings, each
common at the time: "ownest" and "owest". "Owe"
in Shakespeare's day, was sometimes used as a synonym for "own". However,
"owest" conveys the idea that beauty is something borrowed from
nature—that it must be paid back. In this interpretation, "fair" can
be a pun on "fare", or the fare required by nature for life's journey.[8] Other
scholars have pointed out that this borrowing and lending theme within the poem
is true of both nature and humanity. Summer, for example, is said to have a
"lease" with "all too short a date." This monetary theme is
common in many of Shakespeare's sonnets, as it was an everyday theme in his
budding capitalistic society.
|
SONNET
18
|
PARAPHRASE
|
|
Shall
I compare thee to a summer's day?
|
Shall I compare you
to a summer's day?
|
|
Thou
art more lovely and more temperate:
|
You are more lovely
and more constant:
|
|
Rough
winds do shake the darling buds of May,
|
Rough winds shake the
beloved buds of May
|
|
And
summer's lease hath all too short a date:
|
And summer is far too
short:
|
|
Sometime
too hot the eye of heaven shines,
|
At times the sun is
too hot,
|
|
And
often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
|
Or often goes behind
the clouds;
|
|
And
every fair from fair sometime declines,
|
And everything
beautiful sometime will lose its beauty,
|
|
By
chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
|
By misfortune or by
nature's planned out course.
|
|
But
thy eternal summer shall not fade
|
But your youth shall
not fade,
|
|
Nor
lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
|
Nor will you lose the
beauty that you possess;
|
|
Nor
shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
|
Nor will death claim
you for his own,
|
|
When
in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
|
Because in my eternal
verse you will live forever.
|
|
So
long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
|
So long as there are
people on this earth,
|
|
So
long lives this and this gives life to thee.
|
So long will this
poem live on, making you immortal.
|
Notes
temperate (1): i.e., evenly-tempered; not overcome by passion.
the eye of heaven (5): i.e., the sun.
every fair from fair sometime declines (7): i.e., the beauty (fair) of everything beautiful (fair)
will fade (declines). Compare to Sonnet 116: "rosy lips and cheeks/Within his bending sickle's
compass come."
nature's changing course (8): i.e., the natural changes age brings.
that fair thou ow'st (10): i.e., that beauty you possess.
in eternal lines...growest (12): The poet is using a grafting metaphor in this line.
Grafting is a technique used to join parts from two plants with cords so that
they grow as one. Thus the beloved becomes immortal, grafted to time with the
poet's cords (his "eternal lines"). For commentary on whether this
sonnet is really "one long exercise in self-glorification", please
see below.
Sonnet 18 is the best known and most well-loved of all 154 sonnets. It is also
one of the most straightforward in language and intent. The stability of love
and its power to immortalize the subject of the poet's verse is the theme.
The poet starts the praise of his dear friend without ostentation,
but he slowly builds the image of his friend into that of a perfect being. His
friend is first compared to summer in the octave, but, at the start of the
third quatrain (9), he is summer, and thus, he has metamorphosed into the
standard by which true beauty can and should be judged. The poet's only answer
to such profound joy and beauty is to ensure that his friend be forever in
human memory, saved from the oblivion that accompanies death. He achieves this
through his verse, believing that, as history writes itself, his friend will
become one with time. The final couplet reaffirms the poet's hope that as long
as there is breath in mankind, his poetry too will live on, and ensure the
immortality of his muse.
Interestingly, not everyone is willing to accept the role of
Sonnet 18 as the ultimate English love poem. As James Boyd-White puts it:
What kind of love does 'this' in fact give to 'thee'? We know
nothing of the beloved's form or height or hair or eyes or bearing, nothing of
her character or mind, nothing of her at all, really. This 'love poem' is
actually written not in praise of the beloved, as it seems, but in praise of
itself. Death shall not brag, says the poet; the poet shall brag. This famous
sonnet is on this view one long exercise in self-glorification, not a love poem
at all; surely not suitable for earnest recitation at a wedding or anniversary
party, or in a Valentine.
- The
speaker starts by asking or wondering out loud whether he ought to compare
whomever he’s speaking to with a summer’s day.
- Instead
of musing on that further, he jumps right in, and gives us a thesis of
sorts. The object of his description is more "lovely" and more
"temperate" than a summer’s day.
- "Lovely"
is easy enough, but how about that "temperate"? The meaning that
comes to mind first is just "even-keeled" or
"restrained," but "temperate" also introduces, by way
of a double meaning, the theme of internal and external "weather."
"Temperate," as you might have heard on the Weather Channel,
refers to an area with mild temperatures, but also, in Shakespeare’s time,
would have referred to a balance of the "humours."
- No
need to explain this in great detail, but basically doctors since Ancient
Greece had believed that human behavior was dictated by the relative
amount of particular kinds of fluids in the body (if you must know, they
were blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Yummy, no?).
- By
the early 1600s, this theory was being strongly challenged, but people in
Shakespeare’s audience would have known that "temperate" meant
that someone had the right amount of those different fluids.
- The
other important (and less disgusting) issue these lines bring up is the
question of "thee." Normally, we’d just assume that the object
of the poem is his lover, and leave it at that. But with Shakespeare,
these things are always complicated.
- What
can we tell about the relationship between the speaker and his addressee
from the way he addresses "thee"?
- For
the moment, all we can really tell is this: the speaker doesn’t seem to
care much what "thee" thinks. He does ask whether he ought to
make this comparison, but he certainly doesn’t wait long (or at all) for
an answer.
- So
is he just wondering out loud here, pretending "thee" is
present?
- Even
better, and this is important, could "thee" also be us readers?
Is it just us, or does some small part of you imagine that Shakespeare
might be asking you, the reader, whether you want him to
compare you to a summer’s day? Keep that on the back burner as you go
through the poem.
- Finally,
just a note on the meter here:
- Go
ahead and read those first two lines out loud. Notice how they’re kind of
bouncy? That’s the iambic pentameter: "compare thee to a summer’s day."
- So
do you want to see a cool bit of foreshadowing? The pronoun "I"
is a stressed syllable in the first line, but the pronoun "Thou"
is unstressed in the second line. Guess who’s going to be the real subject
of this poem.
Lines 3-4
Rough winds do shake
the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
- Here
the speaker begins to personify nature. In other words, some of the smack
talking he’s doing about summer sounds like he’s talking about a person.
- Basically,
strong summer winds threaten those new flower buds that popped up in May,
and summer just doesn’t last very long.
- The
way he describes the short summer, though, is what’s interesting. Summer
has a "lease" on the weather, just as your family might have a
lease on your car; like a person, summer can enter into, and must abide
by, agreements.
- The
point here is clear enough: the summer is fated to end.
- But
check this out: isn’t summer also fated to begin every year once again?
Can the summer possibly have "too short a date," if it happens
an infinite number of times? Isn’t it, in a meaningful sense, immortal?
- Keep
this in mind as you read on.
Lines 5-6
Sometime too hot the
eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
- Here
comes the major personification of nature. Put simply, the speaker’s
saying sometimes the sun is too hot, and other times you can’t even see it
at all (hidden, we assume, by clouds).
- But
instead of being boring, he calls the sun the "eye of heaven,"
refers to it using the word "his," and gives it a
"complexion," which generally means refers to the skin of the
face.
- Check
out how much more information about the summer we’re getting than we are
about the beloved. Indeed, the speaker is carefully describing the summer
individually, and even in human terms, while he only describes
"thee" in one line and only relative to the summer.
- "Complexion,"
in particular, is especially interesting, as it brings back the whole
"humours" theme we saw in "temperate."
- "Complexion"
used to be used to describe someone’s health, specifically with regard to
their balance of humours. Thus, we see here again that the speaker is
combining descriptions of external weather phenomena with internal
balance.
Lines 7-8
And every fair from
fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
- With
these lines, the speaker gets even broader in his philosophy, declaring
that everything beautiful must eventually fade away and lose its charm,
either by chance or by the natural flow of time. Kind of like teen pop
stars.
- Now
what exactly does "untrimm’d" refer to?
- We
might read it as what happens to "fair" or beautiful things. By
that reading, things that are beautiful eventually lose their trimmings,
or their decorations, and thus fade from beauty.
- On
the other hand, "untrimm’d" is also a term from sailing, as you
"trim," or adjust, the sails to take advantage of the wind. This
gives "untrimm’d" a completely opposite meaning; instead of
"made ugly and plain by natural changes," it means
"unchanged in the face of nature’s natural changes."
·
Here, then, we are subtly prepped for the turn we’re about to
see in…
Sonnet 18 is perhaps
the best known of all sonnets. Shakespeare wrote 154 of them but this one tends
to top most popular lists, mainly due to the opening line which every romantic
knows off by heart.
But there is much more
to this line than meets the eye, as you'll find out later in the analysis. And
please be aware that not every line of every Shakespeare sonnet is written in
pure iambic pentameter - a mistake made by many a supposed authority.
William Shakespeare's
sonnets are world renowned and are said to been written for a 'fair youth' (1 -
126) and a 'dark lady' (127 - 154), but no one is 100% certain. There are no
definite names and no written evidence. Shakespeare may have been well known in
his lifetime but he was also very good at keeping secrets.
The sonnets were first
published in 1609, seven years before his death, and their remarkable quality
has kept them in the public eye ever since. Their depth and range set
Shakespeare apart from all other sonneteers.
His sonnet 18 focuses
on the loveliness of a friend or lover, the speaker initially asking a
rhetorical question comparing them to a summer's day. He then goes on to
introduce the pros and cons of the weather, from an idyllic English summer's
day to a less welcome dimmed sun and rough winds.
In the end, it is the
poetry that will keep the lover alive for ever, defying even death.
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).
Summer time 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 aging 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.
According to Francis Meres, a contemporary of William
Shakespeare, “mellifluous and honey-tongued” Bard of Avon who equals
to the Roman Ovid, is a master artist of sonnet writing. Out of 154 of such
Shakespearean sonnets, the first 126 sonnets are addressed to a handsome youth,
his fair friend. The first 126 sonnets reveal “a story of brief intoxication by
a friendship with a young aristocrat of quick disillusion; of a renewal of
friendly relations on a quite different basis, when Shakespeare was
economically independent of a gradual decay of the relationship”. Shall I
compare Thee to a Summer’s Day (sonnet No. 18),” which ranks among the
most famous love poems of all time can also be read from the above perspective.
The poet in this sonnet eternalizes the beauty of the youth – the beauty with
which his fair friend is adorned. In fact, Shakespeare also preoccupies
the Elizabethan theme
of love and time. He wages war with time and he wants to create a poetic
dimension where the youth will remain immortal.
The poem begins
with a rhetorical question – shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Here
the pronoun ‘thee’ is obviously ‘youth’ which forms a parallel to his fair
friend. Now as the poem progresses the answer to this question is elaborately
given to us. Though the poet identifies youth with the beautiful manifestation
of nature, yet the youth is more “lovely and temperate”. He considers that a
comparison between the beloved youth and a summer day would be in appropriate
and inadequate. Firstly, he feels that ‘more lovely and temperate’ is the form
of beloved youth than the summer day. Secondly, summer’s beauty is inconstant
as the sun sometimes is too hot or sometimes dimmed by clouds. More over, its
beauty is ephemeral, whereas the beauty of beloved youth is eternal. The
supereminences of all earthy beauty is stated in a beautiful line – “And
every fair from fair some time declines”. With the passage of time
fairness of fair object loses its brilliance and brevity. Amidst these turnovers
beauty of youth and his love for that beauty would withstand the blows of
times.
In the third quatrain Shakespeare the
youth, will not lose his beauty even though the ravaging power of time would
put everything within his compass. The very memory of his fair friend identical
as youth will remain a fresh for ever as he with his juvenile form will be
eternalized in the poet’s verses. The concluding couplet reads as:
“So
long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long times this, and this gives life to thee”
Thus the sonnet ends in a defiant couplet where the poet says as long as the
world endures; his poetry will survive and will reanimate and recreate the
youth. The youth has been immortalized through the poet’s eternal verse.
While the sonnet may provide little conclusive information about Shakespeare’s
life and his relationship with the fair friend, it does provide insight into
him as an artist. In fact Shakespeare’s
Sonnet no. 18 is highly metaphorical. The sonnets derive its artistic unity
from its exploration of the universal human themes of time, death, change,
love, lust, and beauty. Thus, Shall I compare Thee to a Summer’s Day
(sonnet No. 18) can also be read as the great dramatic poem.
