Shakespearean sonnets and
poems are closely associated with Love and Death. Investigate the validity of this
statement with reference to “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” and “Fear No
More”.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s
day?
‘Shall
I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ is one of the most famous opening lines in
all of literature. In this post, we’re going to look beyond that opening line,
and the poem’s reputation, and attempt a short summary and analysis of Sonnet
18 in terms of its language, meaning, and themes. The poem represents a bold
and decisive step forward in the sequence of Sonnets as we read them.
For
the first time, the key to the Fair Youth’s immortality lies not in procreation
(as it had been in the previous 17 sonnets) but in Shakespeare’s own verse. But
what is William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 actually saying?
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 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.
Most
of the poems we write about here on Interesting
Literature involve introducing the unfamiliar: we take a poem that
we think has something curious and little-known about it, and try to highlight
that feature, or interpretation. But with ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s
day?’ we have almost the opposite problem: we’re trying to take a very
well-known poem and de-familiarise
it, and try to see it as though we’re coming across it for the first time. This
is by no means an easy task, so we’ll begin with a summary.
First,
then, that summary of Sonnet 18, beginning with that opening question, which
sounds almost like a dare or a challenge, nonchalantly offered up: ‘Shall I
compare thee to a summer’s day?’
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:
Shakespeare
asks the addressee of the sonnet – who is probably the same young man, or ‘Fair
Youth’, to whom the other early sonnets are also addressed – whether he should
compare him to a summery day. He goes on to remark that the young man is
lovelier, and more gentle and dependably constant. After all, in May (which, in
Shakespeare’s time, was considered a bona
fide part of summer) rough winds often shake the beloved flowers of the season
(thus proving the Bard’s point that summer is less ‘temperate’ than the young
man).
What’s
more, summer is over all too quickly: its ‘lease’ – a legal term – soon runs
out. We all know this to be true, when September rolls round, the nights start
drawing in, and we get that sinking ‘back to school’ feeling.
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:
In
lines 5-8, Shakespeare continues his analysis of the ways in which the young
man is better than a summer’s day: sometimes the sun (‘the eye of heaven’)
shines too brightly (i.e. the weather is just too hot, unbearably so), and, conversely, sometimes the sun
is ‘dimmed’ or hidden by clouds. And every lovely or beautiful thing (‘fair’
here in ‘every fair’ is used as a noun, i.e. ‘every fair thing’), even the
summer, sometimes drops a little below its best, either randomly or through the
march of nature (which changes and in time ages every living thing).
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
In
lines 9-12, Shakespeare continues the ‘Youth vs. summer’ motif, arguing that
the young man’s ‘eternal summer’, or prime, will not fade; nor will the Youth’s
‘eternal summer’ lose its hold on the beauty the young man owns (‘ow’st’). Nor
will Death, the Grim Reaper, be able to boast that the young man walks in the
shadow of death, not when the youth grows, not towards death (like a growing or
lengthening shadow) but towards immortality, thanks to the ‘eternal lines’ of
Shakespeare’s verse which will guarantee that he will live forever.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes
can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
In
his concluding couplet, Shakespeare states that as long as the human race
continues to exist, and read poetry, Shakespeare’s poem (‘this’) survives, and
continues to ‘give life’ to the young man through keeping his memory alive.
Sonnet
18 is a curious poem to analyse when it’s set in the context of the previous sonnets. It’s the first poem that doesn’t
exhort the Fair Youth to marry and have children: we’ve left the ‘Procreation
Sonnets’ behind. In the last few sonnets, Shakespeare has begun to introduce
the idea that his poetry might provide an alternative ‘immortality’ for the
young man, though in those earlier sonnets Shakespeare’s verse has been deemed
an inferior way of securing the young man’s immortality when placed next to the
idea of leaving offspring. In Sonnet 18, right from the confident strut of
‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ onwards, Shakespeare is sure that his
poetry will guarantee the young man his immortality after all.
There
is an easy music to the poem, set up by that opening line: look at repetition
of ‘summer’ and ‘some’, which strikes us as natural and not contrived, unlike
some of the effects Shakespeare had created in the earlier sonnets: ‘summer’s
day’, ‘summer’s lease’, ‘Sometime too hot’, ‘sometime declines’, ‘eternal
summer’. This reinforces the inferiority of the summer with its changeability
but also its brevity (‘sometime’ in Shakespeare’s time meant not only
‘sometimes’, suggesting variability and inconstancy, but also ‘once’ or
‘formerly’, suggesting something that is over).
In
terms of imagery, the reference to Death bragging ‘thou wander’st in his shade’,
as well as calling up the words from the 23rd Psalm (‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow
of death’), also fits neatly into the poem’s broader use of summer/sun imagery.
As Stephen Booth points out in the detailed notes to this sonnet in his
indispensable edition Shakespeare’s
Sonnets (Yale Nota Bene), the brightness of that
all-too-fleeting summer’s day has been declining ever since the poem’s opening
line: ‘dimmed’, ‘declines’, ‘fade’, ‘shade’.
‘When
in eternal lines to time thou grow’st’: it’s worth observing the suggestion of
self-referentiality here, with ‘lines’ summoning the lines of Shakespeare’s
verse. In such an analysis, then, ‘eternal lines’ prefigure Shakespeare’s own
immortal lines of poetry, designed to give immortality to the poem’s addressee,
the Fair Youth.
However,
as Booth notes
, this is probably also an
allusion to the lines of life, the threads spun by the Fates in classical
mythology. Everyone’s life span was decided by the Fates, who cut a thread of
corresponding length, i.e. a long thread would mean a long life, and a short
thread would mean you’d be cut down in your prime. So, as Booth points out,
‘eternal lines’ are threads that are never cut. It’s worth bearing in mind that Shakespeare
had referred to these lines of life
in Sonnet 16.
This
is significant, following Booth, if we wish to analysis Sonnet 18 (or ‘Shall I
compare thee to a summer’s day?’ if you’d prefer) in the context of the
preceding sonnets, which had been concerned with procreation. We cannot be sure
who arranged the sonnets into the order in which they were printed in 1609 (in
the first full printing of the poems, featuring that enigmatic dedication to ‘Mr W.
H.’), but it is suggestive that Sonnet
18, in which Shakespeare proudly announces his intention of immortalising the
Fair Youth with his pen, follows a series of sonnets in which Shakespeare’s pen
had urged the Fair Youth to marry and sire offspring as his one chance of
immortality. Now, through the power of his poetry, William Shakespeare the
writer is offering the young man another way of becoming immortal.
Sonnet
18 has undoubtedly become a favourite love poem in the language because its
message and meaning are relatively easy to decipher and analyse. Its opening
line has perhaps eclipsed the rest of the poem to the degree that we have lost
sight of the precise argument Shakespeare is making in seeking to compare the
Youth to a summer’s day, as well as the broader context of the rest of the
Sonnets and the implications this has for our interpretation of Sonnet 18. The
poem reveals a new confidence in Shakespeare’s approach to the Sonnets, and in
the ensuing sonnets he will take this even further.
‘Fear No More the
Heat o’ the Sun’ is one of the most famous songs from a Shakespeare play,
although its context – in the late play Cymbeline – is often
forgotten, and is not as well-known, perhaps, to begin with. Here’s the text of
‘Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun’ followed by a few words of comment and
analysis.
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Fear no more the frown o’ the great;
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.
Fear no more the lightning flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan:
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.
No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renownèd be thy grave!
Taken from one of the ‘problem
plays’, Cymbeline, this song is sung over the dead bodies of Cloten
and Fidele, the latter of whom (spoiler alert) is actually the heroine Imogen
disguised as a boy, and is not really dead; merely drugged.
Nevertheless, at the point in the play
where they appear, Act IV Scene 2, the lines effectively say that ‘the good thing
about being dead is that you no longer need to fear the hardships of life.’
In summary, the singers of the song,
the characters Guiderius and Arviragus, the sons of Cymbeline in the play and
half-brothers to Imogen (who is really one of the ‘men’ over whom this dirge is
being sung), take it in turns with the first two verses: Guiderius sings the
first, and Arviragus the second, with them alternating the lines of the third
and fourth verses until they both sing the final couplet together.
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
The meaning of the song is simple: if
you’re dead, you need fear no more either the excessive heat of the summer sun,
nor the harsh winter cold; you’ve done your duty, and have gone ‘home’ back to
the earth which bore you; everyone must die, from the highest-born and the
fittest (‘Golden lads and girls’) to the lowest-born and the weakest
(‘chimney-sweepers’).
There is, of course, a bit of wordplay
in that phrase ‘come to dust’: chimney-sweepers must ‘come to dust’ not only
because they will return to dust (‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust’, in the words
of the burial service from the Book of Common Prayer), but because that’s their
job – i.e. they ‘come to dust’ when they go up the chimney to clean the dust
out.
Fear no more the frown o’ the great;
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.
In the second verse, we’re told that
another good thing about being dead is that you’re beyond the reach of a
tyrant’s rule, you don’t need to worry about feeding and clothing yourself or
others, and everything is as pointless and worthless to you as everything else.
Fear no more the lightning flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan:
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.
In the third verse, the list of Things
The Dead Need Not Concern Themselves With continues: thunder and lightning,
people saying bad or untrue things about you behind your back (‘slander’) or
telling you off (‘censure rash’). Both the happy and sad times are now behind
you when you’re dead.
No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renownèd be thy grave!
And in the final verse, the tone
switches, with the two singers asking that nobody disturb the sleep of the
dead: neither exorcists seeking to expel evil demons, nor witches seeking to
use demons to raise you from the dead; no ghosts to bother you, and no bad things
to befall you.
The critic Hugh Kenner asserted that
‘golden lads’ and ‘chimney-sweepers’, as well as referring to young boys,
carried a second meaning: ‘golden lads’ being Warwickshire dialect for yellow
dandelions, and ‘chimney-sweepers’ being another regional term for dandelions,
which indeed ‘come to dust’ when you blow on them and are left holding nothing
but a stalk.
However, this appears to be a myth, although it would make
sense that a Warwickshire lad like William Shakespeare, hailing from
Stratford-upon-Avon, would have known such terms, if they had been
regional dialect words for those flowers.
For the pioneering modernist poet and thinker T. E. Hulme,
‘Golden lads’ is a fine example of what Hulme identified as Shakespeare’s
‘classicism’. Drawing a distinction between the more effusive and emotionally
incontinent mode of literary romanticism, and the more steely and reserved mode of classicism, Hulme
used these lines from ‘Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun’ as evidence of the
Bard’s steely stoicism. A lesser poet, prone to taking the ‘easy’ romantic
route, would have written ‘Golden youths’ rather than the more down-to-earth
lads, in order to ramp up the appeal to the emotions the lines call for (and
ironically, in doing so, would probably have lessened their effect).
The poem ‘Fear no more heat o’ the sun’ by William
Shakespeare is a poem about that death can come at any age, and all the
troubles and worries that happening while living will not matter while we are
dead. In this poem the persona reassures the responder about the notion of
death numerous times. The
imperative mood of the opening line, “Fear no more…” reassures the responder
about the notion of death. Shakespeare’s repetition of this line
throughout the first three stanzas reinforces this idea, while the volta
created by the shift to the exclamatory mood in the final stanza serves to
drive this message home for the responder as it soothes the human anxiety about
death. The juxtaposition of the two extremes of the “heat o’ the sun” and the
“furious winter” reinforces the idea that we have no need to fear even the most
harsh seasons. Furthermore, Shakespeare personifies the winter in order
to dramatise this contrast while the diction of the adjective “furious”
emphasises this drama.The juxtaposition of the two extremes “Golden lads and
girls” (“golden” symbolising wealth and favour) and “chimney-sweepers”
(symbolising the poor street urchins) conveys the idea that death is
inevitable, because these extremes represent the children of the richest and
those of the poorest classes to symbolise that death equally to all
humanity regardless of social-class. The diction of “must” creates high
modality to emphasise death’s inevitability, which is represented by the
metaphor and biblical allusion “come to dust”. This allusion, together with the
diction “must”, is repeated at the end of the first three stanzas to highlight
the poem’s central thesis about the inevitability of death.
Sources:
·
https://interestingliterature.com/2016/12/a-short-analysis-of-shakespeares-sonnet-18-shall-i-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day/
·
https://interestingliterature.com/2019/08/a-short-analysis-of-the-shakespeare-song-fear-no-more-the-heat-o-the-sun/
·
https://sites.google.com/site/poemanalysis101/fear-no-more-the-heat-o-the-sun
