Sonnet 18

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. 

Lines 1-2

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

1.      The speaker starts by asking or wondering out loud whether he ought to compare whomever he’s speaking to with a summer’s day.

2.      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.

3.      "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."

4.      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?).

5.      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.

6.      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.

7.      What can we tell about the relationship between the speaker and his addressee from the way he addresses "thee"?

8.      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.

9.      So is he just wondering out loud here, pretending "thee" is present?

10.  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.

11.  Finally, just a note on the meter here:

12.  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."

13.   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:

1.      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.

2.      Basically, strong summer winds threaten those new flower buds that popped up in May, and summer just doesn’t last very long.

3.      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.

4.      The point here is clear enough: the summer is fated to end.

5.      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?

6.      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;

1.      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).

2.      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.

3.      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.

4.      "Complexion," in particular, is especially interesting, as it brings back the whole "humours" theme we saw in "temperate."

5.      "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;

1.      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.

2.      Now what exactly does "untrimm’d" refer to?

3.      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.

4.      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."

5.      Here, then, we are subtly prepped for the turn we’re about to see in…

Lines 9-10But thy eternal summer shall not fade, 

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

1.      The turn! Check out the "Form and Meter" section for more on line 9 in sonnets, but here’s a classic example of a "turn."

2.      Suddenly (though it was foreshadowed a bit in line 8), the tone and direction of the poem changes dramatically. Moving on from bashing summer and the limitations inherent in nature, the speaker pronounces that the beloved he’s speaking to isn’t subject to all of these rules he’s laid out.

3.      The speaker argues that, unlike the real summer, his beloved’s summer (by which he means beautiful, happy years) will never go away, nor will the beloved lose his/her beauty.

4.      But remember what we mentioned in line 4? The summer in real life actually is an "eternal summer," since it comes back every year for all eternity. Just like we saw with all of the personifications of nature in the previous lines, we begin to notice here that "thee" and the "summer’s day" are really quite similar.

5.      Both can fade away or, depending on how you look at it, be eternal, and both can be personified. That’s why here, at line 9, the poet switches direction – both the beloved and nature are threatened mainly by time, and it is only through this third force (poetry), that they can live on.

6.      It’s also worth picking up on that word "ow’st." That apostrophe might be contracting "ownest" or "owest," and both work nicely. Either the beloved won’t lose the beauty he/she possesses ("owns"), or won’t have to return the beauty he/she borrowed from nature and now owes back.

7.      These readings both resonate well with line 4, in which the speaker described the summer months as a "lease," or a temporary ownership that had to be returned.

Lines 11-12

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;

1.      In another bit of personification (so far we’ve had summer and the sun), the speaker introduces death.

2.      Death, the speaker claims, won’t get a chance to claim the beloved in the valley of the shadow of death (this death’s shadow idea is from Psalm 23:4), since he/she is immortal.

3.      The general meaning of line 12 (you’re eternal) is actually easier to see if you read the line as a metaphor. As a metaphor, "lines to time" definitely refers to a poem, since they are lines set to a meter, or time.

4.      Here, then, the poet is making two bold claims: first, that his poem is "eternal," and second, that it nourishes and develops "thee," as it is where he/she is able to "grow."

5.      Now this willingness to discuss the fact that he’s writing a poem within the poem itself is pretty cool stuff.

6.      One fancy way of describing this kind of artistic tactic is called "breaking the fourth wall." That’s a metaphor itself, and you can think of it as a stage: in a normal play, any indoor action goes on as if the front edge of the stage were an imaginary wall. The actors, in other words, are supposed to pretend they’re in a real world with four walls and no audience watching them. If the actors, however, recognize that there’s an audience out there, they’re considered to be "breaking" through that fourth wall, as they try to do away with the artificiality of pretending they’re just living out a normal life up there on stage.

7.      Well that’s exactly what’s starting to go on here. If you were thinking this poem was a love letter to a beloved, you can forget it. This is a poem written to be read by an audience, and that audience, by continuing to read the poem, will try to make the beloved grow into a character, and in turn make him/her immortal.

Lines 13-14

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

1.      The couplet, in the end, is really just a fuller admission of what the speaker points toward in line 12.

2.      He has completely shattered the fourth wall, and (successfully, we should add) predicted that this poem will continue to be read, and the beloved will continue to be analyzed and re-analyzed for all time.

3.      In other words, by allowing us to try to give life to "thee" (figuring out who he/she was), the speaker and the poem itself give "thee" life.

4.      In other words: as long as men live and can read, this poem will continue to live, and so keep "thee" alive.

5.      But let's examine the language more closely. First of all, we’ve got some more personification: technically, eyes don’t really "see," and poems certainly don’t "live."

6.      Also, it’s worth noting the incredible arrogance here: why should we believe that as long as humankind exists, this poem will continue to live? Can’t we imagine a world in which every copy of this poem were burned, and so "thee" would stop living?

7.      And even if people are still reading the poem, what kind of "life" is it that the beloved will be leading? This definitely doesn’t sound like heaven. The beloved can’t make any choices for his or her self, isn’t conscious, and can only be recognized as the poet described him or her.

8.      In fact, we ought to wonder whether it is "thee" who will be alive, or rather the poet’s (very limited) representation of "thee."

9.      Plus, remember how in line 9 we noted that summer could also be eternal? Well, the end of this poem kind of makes you wonder. So why, again, is the beloved eternal but not summer? Just like summer, the beloved is going to fade away in real life, and just like summer, the beloved has been written about and preserved in a poem. How come, by the end of the poem, it’s only "thee" who lives on and not nature?

10.  Finally, remember how back in line 1 we were already wondering if "thee" might not just be the speaker’s lover, but also us readers? Well now the speaker has broken through the fourth wall, and revealed himself as not just a lover, but also as a writer of poetry.

11.  So check this out (this should be fun for you math kids out there): the speaker is talking to "thee," and that speaker is actually the poet. Now who do poets write for? That’s right, for us readers.

12.  So we have three conditions here: the speaker speaks only to "thee," the writer speaks only to us, and the speaker and writer are the same thing. Doesn’t that mean, then, that "thee," is the same as "us"? Trippy.

13.  Frankly, we think that’s a pretty cool reading. Basically, the speaker here is speaking to all of mankind. All of us feel this pressure of mortality, but here Shakespeare crystallizes that anxiety in a poem, so that this idea of mankind will live on forever.

14.  The last lines, then, can be read as circular: "so long as mankind lives, mankind will continue to live."

15.  Cool? Too weird? You decide.

In any case, these last two lines hammer home something we suspected from those very first pronouns: this speaker seems more interested in himself and his abilities as a poet than the qualities of his addressee.

Summary

One of the best known of Shakespeare's sonnets, Sonnet 18 is memorable for the skillful and varied presentation of subject matter, in which the poet's feelings reach a level of rapture unseen in the previous sonnets. The poet here abandons his quest for the youth to have a child, and instead glories in the youth's beauty.

Initially, the poet poses a question — "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" — and then reflects on it, remarking that the youth's beauty far surpasses summer's delights. The imagery is the very essence of simplicity: "wind" and "buds." In the fourth line, legal terminology — "summer's lease" — is introduced in contrast to the commonplace images in the first three lines. Note also the poet's use of extremes in the phrases "more lovely," "all too short," and "too hot"; these phrases emphasize the young man's beauty.

Although lines 9 through 12 are marked by a more expansive tone and deeper feeling, the poet returns to the simplicity of the opening images. As one expects in Shakespeare's sonnets, the proposition that the poet sets up in the first eight lines — that all nature is subject to imperfection — is now contrasted in these next four lines beginning with "But." Although beauty naturally declines at some point — "And every fair from fair sometime declines" — the youth's beauty will not; his unchanging appearance is atypical of nature's steady progression. Even death is impotent against the youth's beauty. Note the ambiguity in the phrase "eternal lines": Are these "lines" the poet's verses or the youth's hoped-for children? Or are they simply wrinkles meant to represent the process of aging? Whatever the answer, the poet is jubilant in this sonnet because nothing threatens the young man's beautiful appearance.

Then follows the concluding couplet: "So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." The poet is describing not what the youth is but what he will be ages hence, as captured in the poet's eternal verse — or again, in a hoped-for child. Whatever one may feel about the sentiment expressed in the sonnet and especially in these last two lines, one cannot help but notice an abrupt change in the poet's own estimate of his poetic writing. Following the poet's disparaging reference to his "pupil pen" and "barren rhyme" in Sonnet 16, it comes as a surprise in Sonnet 18 to find him boasting that his poetry will be eternal.

This sonnet compares the speaker’s lover to a number of other beauties—and never in the lover’s favor. Her eyes are “nothing like the sun,” her lips are less red than coral; compared to white snow, her breasts are dun-colored, and her hairs are like black wires on her head. In the second quatrain, the speaker says he has seen roses separated by color (“damasked”) into red and white, but he sees no such roses in his mistress’s cheeks; and he says the breath that “reeks” from his mistress is less delightful than perfume. In the third quatrain, he admits that, though he loves her voice, music “hath a far more pleasing sound,” and that, though he has never seen a goddess, his mistress—unlike goddesses—walks on the ground. In the couplet, however, the speaker declares that, “by heav’n,” he thinks his love as rare and valuable “As any she belied with false compare”—that is, any love in which false comparisons were invoked to describe the loved one’s beauty.

Commentary:

This sonnet, one of Shakespeare’s most famous, plays an elaborate joke on the conventions of love poetry common to Shakespeare’s day, and it is so well-conceived that the joke remains funny today. Most sonnet sequences in Elizabethan England were modeled after that of Petrarch. Petrarch’s famous sonnet sequence was written as a series of love poems to an idealized and idolized mistress named Laura. In the sonnets, Petrarch praises her beauty, her worth, and her perfection using an extraordinary variety of metaphors based largely on natural beauties. In Shakespeare’s day, these metaphors had already become cliche (as, indeed, they still are today), but they were still the accepted technique for writing love poetry. The result was that poems tended to make highly idealizing comparisons between nature and the poets’ lover that were, if taken literally, completely ridiculous. My mistress’ eyes are like the sun; her lips are red as coral; her cheeks are like roses, her breasts are white as snow, her voice is like music, she is a goddess.

In many ways, Shakespeare’s sonnets subvert and reverse the conventions of the Petrarchan love sequence: the idealizing love poems, for instance, are written not to a perfect woman but to an admittedly imperfect man, and the love poems to the dark lady are anything but idealizing (“My love is as a fever, longing still / For that which longer nurseth the disease” is hardly a Petrarchan conceit.) Sonnet 130mocks the typical Petrarchan metaphors by presenting a speaker who seems to take them at face value, and somewhat bemusedly, decides to tell the truth. Your mistress’ eyes are like the sun? That’s strange—my mistress’ eyes aren’t at all like the sun. Your mistress’ breath smells like perfume? My mistress’ breath reeks compared to perfume. In the couplet, then, the speaker shows his full intent, which is to insist that love does not need these conceits in order to be real; and women do not need to look like flowers or the sun in order to be beautiful.

The rhetorical structure of Sonnet 130 is important to its effect. In the first quatrain, the speaker spends one line on each comparison between his mistress and something else (the sun, coral, snow, and wires—the one positive thing in the whole poem some part of his mistress is like. In the second and third quatrains, he expands the descriptions to occupy two lines each, so that roses/cheeks, perfume/breath, music/voice, and goddess/mistress each receive a pair of unrhymed lines. This creates the effect of an expanding and developing argument, and neatly prevents the poem—which does, after all, rely on a single kind of joke for its first twelve lines—from becoming stagnant.

Sonnet 18 Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory, Change, Fate, and Eternity: Symbol Analysis

However much it might look he’s praising a beloved, this poet is definitely more concerned with tooting his own horn. Really, you could sum up the poem like this: "Dear Beloved: You’re better than a summer’s day. But only because I can make you eternal by writing about you. Love, Shakespeare." That message is why images and symbols of time, decay, and eternity are all over this poem. Whether or not we think the beloved is actually made immortal (or just more immortal than the summer’s day) is up in the air, but it’s certainly what the speaker wants you to think.

1.       Line 4: This is where the speaker starts pointing to how short summer feels. Using personification and metaphor, the speaker suggests that summer has taken out a lease on the weather, which must be returned at the end of the summer. Summer is treated like a home-renter, while the weather is treated like a real-estate property.

2.       Lines 7-8: These lines give us the problem (everything’s going to fade away) that the poet is going to work against.

3.       Lines 9-12: These lines are full of all sorts of figurative language, all pointing to how the speaker is going to save the beloved from the fate of fading away. The beloved’s life is described in a metaphor as a "summer," and then his or her beauty is described in another metaphor as a commodity than can be owned or owed. Death is then personified, as the overseer of the shade (a metaphor itself for an afterlife). Finally the "lines to time" are a metaphor for poetry, which will ultimately save the beloved, and "eternal" is a parallel with "eternal summer" in line 9.

4.       Lines 13-14: What’s so interesting about these lines is that it’s hard to tell whether the speaker is using figurative language or not. Does he actually mean that the poem is alive, and that it will keep the beloved alive? Well, it depends what we mean by "alive." If we read alive

scientifically, as in breathing and thinking, well then alive is definitely a metaphor. But if we read it as describing a continued existence of some kind, well then maybe he does mean it literally, since surely the poem and the beloved exist for us in some sense.

Poetry: Symbol Analysis:

If the major question of this poem is how to become immortal, and thus more wonderful than a summer’s day, the speaker’s answer is poetry. For that reason, poetry takes on an inflated importance in the poem, and is attended by dramatic, powerful language.

1.       Line 1: This rhetorical question accomplishes a lot, including setting down the main axis of comparison in the poem, and also implying that the speaker is only making a show of caring what we readers or the beloved actually think (since he clearly can’t care how or whether we answer him). In addition to these roles, though, the word "compare" gives this line a special charge, since it is a word that is so closely tied up with the role of poetry. If you were to try to define poetry, one thing you might say is that poets really like to compare things that are really dissimilar and show they can be connected. In a sense, then, we can read this line as "should I write a poem about you?" In that way, the speaker has already made the act of writing poetry an issue in this poem, and, as we’ll see, his answer to this question is obviously, "heck yeah I should write a poem about you, since I can make you immortal!"

2.       Lines 12-14: These lines are where the poet finally begins to talk about poetry more clearly. The phrase "lines to time," creates a metaphor for poetry, since poetry is lines of words set to a time, or meter. Then, using a parallel in the last two lines, he asserts that as long as humans live, his poetry will survive, and, in turn, so too will the beloved. The question, of course, is what he means by the poem giving "life" to the beloved. It’s in some sense a metaphor, at least, since the poem isn’t about to perform CPR on the beloved’s corpse every time the poem is read. But if "life" just means having someone think about you, then sure, the poem could give life to the beloved.

Personified Nature:  Symbol Analysis

From the beginning of the poem, the speaker tries to set up a contrast between the beloved and a summer’s day. He tries really hard to distinguish them, ultimately arguing that the beloved, unlike nature, will be saved by the force and permanence of his poetry. The thing is, the contrast doesn’t really work, since summer, if anything, seems much more eternal than the beloved. If being written about preserves immortality, then the summer ought to be immortal because the speaker’s writing about it as well. And then there’s the fact that summer actually is, in some sense, immortal, since it returns in full force every year.

1.       Line 1: This is a rhetorical question, as the speaker definitely doesn’t care how or whether we answer him, and it also introduces what will be the main metaphor of the poem, as the summer’s day will be discussed using concepts more literally applicable to the beloved than to summer itself.

2.       Line 2: "Temperate" is a pun, since it carries two important meanings here. When applied to the beloved, it means "showing moderation or self-restraint," but when applied to the summer’s day it means, "having mild temperatures."

3.       Lines 3-4: This is all personification here. Even if winds might really be able to "shake" things, and buds could be described as "darling," these are both words more often applied to human actions. The next line is a much more obvious case of personification, as summer can’t literally take out a lease on anything. Note also that this implies a metaphor of the weather as a rentable property. Also, the "darling buds" introduce an extended metaphor of plant life and the conditions needed to sustain life that runs through the rest of the poem

4.       Lines 5-6: There’s the apparent opposition here, in that sometimes the weather is too hot, and sometimes it’s too cold. But there’s also personification with "eye" and "complexion." What’s more, "complexion" doesn’t just mean the appearance of the face, but also had a second meaning in Shakespeare’s time, referring to someone’s general internal well-being. Note also that the plant life extended metaphor is continued in "shines" and "dimm’d," since plants need light in order to flourish.

5.       Line 9: Here the personification is inverted: instead of describing nature in human terms, the speaker is describing the beloved in the terms of nature, giving him or her an "eternal summer" which could not literally apply.

6.       Line 11: "Shade" makes for a continuation of the plant life extended metaphor, since if you’re a plant stuck in the shade, that’s some bad news. "Shade" is also a pun, because it can mean "ghost."

7.       Line 12: The plant life extended metaphor is completed, as the speaker finally points out a way that plants can "grow," instead of all of these problems they faced in previous lines of the poem. Now what is this way? Well, perhaps aside from suggesting poetry, "lines to time" could also conjure up an image of plants lined up in rows in a farm. In other words, plants need to be organized and cultivated by humans in order to survive. This works really well with the main theme in the rest of the poem: that the beloved needs to be organized and developed by the poet in order to survive.

Leases and Debt: Symbol Analysis

The speaker of "Sonnet 18" is really trying to simplify nature and fate, since he’s trying to hurdle over their limitations with his poetry. One way he does it is to reduce them to economic transactions – something simple, easy to understand, and most importantly, work around.

1.       Line 4: He describes summer as having a "lease" over the weather. This is, of course, personification, since summer couldn’t hold a lease, but for the purposes of this theme, it’s also a metaphor, since the weather isn’t actually a product that can be bought, sold, or rented.

2.       Line 10: Here the speaker jumps back into the economics lingo, using both a metaphor and a pun. The metaphor is similar to what we saw in line 4: here beauty, instead of the weather, is what can be bought, sold, and rented. But here there’s also a cool pun with the word "ow’st," as it could mean both "owest" and "ownest." Either way, he’s still playing with the property metaphor, but we can wonder whether the beloved’s beauty is something he or she owns, or something that he or she has only borrowed, and would have to return if not for the speaker’s poetry.

Analysis:  Form and Meter:

A Shakespearean Sonnet in Iambic Pentameter:

This is a classic Shakespearean sonnet with fourteen lines in very regular iambic pentameter. With the exception of a couple relatively strong first syllables (and even these are debatable), there are basically no deviations from the meter. There aren’t even any lines that flow over into the next line – every single line is end-stopped. There are two quatrains (groups of four lines), followed by a third quatrain in which the tone of the poem shifts a bit, which is in turn followed by a rhyming couplet (two lines) that wraps the poem up. The rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

The form of this sonnet is also notable for being a perfect model of the Shakespearean sonnet form. Just as in older Italian sonnets by which the English sonnets (later to be called Shakespearean sonnets) were inspired, the ninth line introduces a significant change in tone or position. Here Shakespeare switches from bashing the summer to describing the immortality of his beloved. This poem also has the uniquely English twist of a concluding rhyming couplet that partially sums up and partially redefines what came before it. In this case, the closing lines have the feel of a cute little poem of their own, making it clear that the poet’s abilities were the subject of this poem all along.

Don’t be fooled, though: beyond the form, this is not your stereotypical sonnet. The main reason is that sonnets, at least before Shakespeare was writing, were almost exclusively love poems. Certainly this poem has some of the qualities of a love poem, but, to say the least, this poem isn’t just a poet’s outpouring of love for someone else. Check out the "Love" theme for more on that.

Analysis: Speaker:

Generally, it’s a good rule of thumb to avoid calling the speaker of a poem by the name of the author. The idea is that the speaker in a work of literature, describing the subject matter, could very well be (and often is) another kind of character created by the author.But Shakespeare makes things tricky: what if that speaker acknowledges that he’s writing a poem? Doesn’t that mean he is Shakespeare, the writer of this poem? Well, this certainly makes the speaker look a lot more like the Bard, since this is a poem in a book of poems by William Shakespeare. Still, we have to keep in mind that they’re not necessarily the same, since we can easily imagine Shakespeare inventing a character who writes poems. For that reason, we’ll keep calling him the speaker instead of Shakespeare.Now, this speaker is one cocky son of a gun. You can tell that he’s the kind of guy who says annoying things out loud to pump himself up, like, "You’re damn right you look good in this new blazer" while posing in front of a mirror. The fun for him is seeing how great he is.

The poem is an ego trip from start to finish. That rhetorical question to open things up? It’s just that: rhetorical. He knows we’re not about to say, "No, you shan’t compare anyone to a summer’s day." If he said, "Shall I go abuse my adorable puppy?" we’d have no way of stopping him. He’s got us right where he wants us, and by asking a question we can’t possibly answer, he’s already on a power trip, since we’re not about to quit reading this little 14-line poem.In the second line he makes his one and only concession to "thee," recognizing that he or she is "lovely" and "temperate," but check out the stresses in these first two lines: "I" is a stressed syllable but "thee" and "thou" aren’t! And from then on it’s even more brazen self-congratulation. He goes into a bit of indulgent, very poetry-ish personification of summer and nature, and then swoops in for his grand entrance as God, announcing: "Behold my power, for I have made you, unlike summer, immortal." And here’s what makes it extra irritating: he’s right. He thinks he’s a stud and he’s spot on – if you’re reading the poem (which you just did), he’s given "thee" new life, or at least "life" as he defines it, which is being analyzed and admired. But give that a second thought: has he really given the beloved something summer doesn’t have? Isn’t he tooting his own horn a bit? The summer is discussed and admired eternally, since it comes around every year, and so isn’t all that different than the beloved as presented in the poem. You could, then, see the speaker as a delusional self-flatterer, strutting his stuff on the stage.

Analysis: Setting:

Where It All Goes Down:

Imagine a poet sitting out in a field on a warm but breezy summer day, contemplating the nature of existence and jotting down some poetic philosophy. We imagine it’s kind of  like the weather when Newton sat under a tree and an apple fell on his head. This is thinkin’ weather. Anyway, even if the weather can get annoying, with bursts of heat and moments of shade, the sun eventually shines through the clouds.

Analysis: Sound Check

When we read this poem out loud, the first thing that strikes us is how neat the whole thing is. It’s so perfectly tied up. Every single line bounces along in perfect iambic pentameter, with no enjambment (lines running on into the next lines with no pause at the end of the line). Basically, the sound of this poem is perfect. Now on one hand that’s cool, because it’s really elegant poetry, but on the other hand there’s something weird about it, and it works well with the dominant themes of the poem.
Basically, the poem is almost too perfect. If the speaker were truly enraptured in love and completely obsessed with his beloved, we might suspect his words to come out a bit awkwardly as he tries to organize his intensely emotional thoughts into symbols. Instead, this poem is really crafted and sounds planned. In fact, the poem is so carefully put together that it gives us readers almost no leeway in how we choose to read it. Check out those last two lines: "So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." Just try to read that in any way other than a really straightforward iambic pentameter. The speaker has completely locked us into his way of reading the poem. In sum, then, the sound helps us notice that this poet is more of a schemer than a lover.

Analysis: What's Up With the Title?

Not much to say about the title here. This is indeed a sonnet, and the "Form and Meter" section describes how Shakespeare made the sonnet form his own. As far as the number eighteen is concerned, it’s only important in that this is the first of the sonnets in which the speaker starts to address "thee" (often referred to by scholars as "the fair youth") more romantically, where previously he had been more of a father figure.

Analysis: Calling Card

Artistic Self-reference

Some people like to say that all art is ultimately about two things: love and death. Shakespeare, though, never one to be complacent, noticed that it’s silly to reduce art to two things that don’t take into account the medium through which they’re presented. In other words, a big theme for Shakespeare is artistic self-reference – the Bard is never going to let you forget that what you’re reading or seeing performed isn’t the same thing as real life. You can see this all over the place in his major plays. Check out the play-within-a-play in Hamlet, the epilogue of As You Like It, or the entire The Tempest for a couple of examples.

Shakespeare completely refuses to let you feel comfortable in a world of fiction. He’s going to remind you, over and over again, that what happens on stage, or, in this case, in a poem, is an artistically created world, and so works differently than our world. Still, though, this fake world is a really important part of our world, and he knows it. In other words, the world of fiction isn’t the same thing as our world, but it’s really important to understanding how our world works. And Sonnet 18, as you might have noticed, is basically the epitome of this kind of thinking. Shakespeare basically says, "this isn’t a love letter, it’s a poem, and you’re going to like it. In fact you’re reading it right now. Checkmate."

Analysis: Tough-O-Meter

(4) Base Camp

Here’s a poem that isn’t particularly hard to get through. In fact, if we were just judging on difficulty of comprehending the meaning of the words on the page, this might be a 2. "Sonnet 18," though, gets a major bump because of the hours, days, or years you could spend trying to work out some of the issues it raises with regard to reality and fiction, immortality, and the general role of art. The issues couldn’t be meatier, so prepare for a serious encounter.

ANALYSIS: BRAIN SNACKS

Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge

The original 1609 Quarto of the sonnets was dedicated "To the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets Mr. W. H. all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth." Confusing? You’re darn right. Scholars for centuries have agonized over this little dedication, trying to figure out not only what the heck it means but, more importantly, who this mysterious "Mr. W. H." is. Could he be the "Fair Youth" referred to in the sonnets? In the academic world, it doesn’t get much better than Shakespeare mysteries. (Source)

ANALYSIS: SEX RATING

Exactly how steamy is this poem?

This sonnet in particular really doesn’t have anything in the way of sex, but if you read the poem in the context of all of Shakespeare's sonnets, it’d be hard to get away with a G rating. The whole series is intensely sexual, and the poems about the "fair youth," of which this is often considered a part, feature homoerotic romance between the speaker and a younger man. On its own, though, the poem is just kind of cute.

ANALYSIS: SHOUT OUTS:

When poets refer to other great works, people, and events, it’s usually not accidental. Put on your super-sleuth hat and figure out why.

Religion:

1.      The Bible: In line 11, the speaker refers to the 23rd psalm, when he speaks of Death’s "shade."

SONNET 18 THEME OF LOVE:

Sonnet 18 opens up looking an awful lot like a traditional love poem, but by the end it’s pretty clear that the poet is much more into himself and the poetry he produces than the beloved he’s addressing. In fact, at times it seems like he might actually harbor some resentment toward the beloved. So if it is a love poem, it’s to the poet.

Questions About Love:

1.      Is this a love poem? If so, to whom?

2.      What can we learn about the beloved from this sonnet? What does the speaker care about?

3.      What’s at stake in choosing "lovely" and "temperate" as the only two descriptions of the beloved?

Chew on This:

Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.

Sonnet 18 is a masked attack on the character of the beloved, couched in a self-obsessed monologue.

SONNET 18 THEME OF LITERATURE AND WRITING:

Like much of Shakespeare’s work, Sonnet 18 is all about writing and expressing one’s self through language. This is, at its clearest, a poem about the power of the written word over death, fate, and possibly even love.

Questions About Literature and Writing:

1.      Is this speaker trying to be a good writer? Do you think he succeeds?

2.      Line 11 features an unusually clear Bible reference. What’s the deal with that?

3.      How does someone "grow" in "eternal lines to time" (12)? What’s up with that?

4.      Does Shakespeare’s poetry actually make the beloved more "eternal" than summer? Is that even possible?

Chew on This:

Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.

Sonnet 18 can be read as a critique of reasoning by analogy, as the speaker, running through a series of increasingly tangential musings, completely loses sight of what he set out to do.

SONNET 18 THEME OF TIME:

The speaker of Sonnet 18 is absolutely fixated on fate and mortality, but believes he’s come up with an effective time machine: poetry. Instead of contemplating a beautiful summer’s day, this speaker can’t stop thinking about how everything in life is temporary and fleeting. No need to fear, though – the hero-poet steps in and announces that, by artistically representing his beloved, he can save him or her from the ravages of time. "Time," then, is the intersection of the "Literature and Writing" theme and the "Man and the Natural World" theme. Man, in the natural world, can’t avoid being subject to time, but it is through literature, the poet argues, that he can free himself.

Questions About Time:

1.      How does someone "grow" in "eternal lines to time" (12)? What’s up with that?

2.      Discuss the character of "Death" and how he impacts our reading of the poem as a whole. Specifically, what’s he doing bragging and why does the speaker choose this moment to bring up the Bible?

3.      The idea of borrowing shows up a couple times in the poem. How does borrowing affect the treatment of time in the poem?

4.      Why doesn’t the speaker mention the fact that summer begins around every year, instead of focusing only on its end?

Chew on This:

Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.

Even while declaring the power of prose over nature, the speaker manages to maintain the appearance of a deterministic universe.

SONNET 18 THEME OF MAN AND THE NATURAL WORLD:

On one level, Sonnet 18 is clearly concerned with the relationship between man and the eventual, inescapable death he’ll encounter in nature. On another level, the poet also seems fascinated by the relationship between seasonal weather and personal, internal "weather" and balance.

Questions About Man and the Natural World

1.      Why do you think the speaker chose the season of summer in particular? Why not Fall, Winter, or Spring? Can you imagine (or write, if you’re feeling creative) how the poem would work with different seasons?

2.      Is there a connection between weather and fate?

3.      There’s a lot of imagery revolving around light and vision in the poem ("eye," "shines," "fade," "shade," and "see"). How do these images work in the thematic structure of the poem? What is there to see, and what is obscured?

Chew on This

Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.

By juxtaposing images of natural turmoil with interior balance, the speaker suggests that harmony can be achieved only by human, rather than environmental, causes.

SONNET 18 LOVE QUOTES

Quote #1

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? 
Thou art more lovely and more temperate (1-2)

At first glance, the poem seems to start like a really awkward little love poem, doesn’t it? It feels like the poet is almost awkward in professing his love. He has to ask whether he ought to go ahead with the comparison (couldn’t he just make the comparison without all the anxiety?), and the best compliments he can come up with are "lovely" and "temperate." This isn’t high-flown language, and there’s nothing particularly inspiring here. If we didn’t have the rest of the poem to go on, we’d think this poem was by some sad sap who had no idea how to express himself poetically. Instead, though, once we get to the end of the poem, we realize that these lines sound awkward because the speaker’s heart isn’t really in it. He’s into himself and the idea of writing a poem, and it’s only there where his language can shine.

 

Quote #2

But thy eternal summer shall not fade (9)

In line 9 we come to realize that this whole comparison with the summer is bizarre. Check out this line: "thy eternal summer shall not fade." That’s like saying "thy unbreakable armor shall not be broken." Duh, his/her eternal summer won’t fade, because it’s eternal. Plus, there’s the added issue that the comparison of real summer to the beloved’s "summer" doesn’t fully make sense. The speaker is claiming that the real summer is temporary, while the beloved’s metaphorical summer is eternal. But the problem is, even the real summer is eternal, because it happens every year. The line "summer’s lease hath all too short a date" doesn’t entirely make sense, because even if each individual summer is limited, summer itself is eternal. To us, all of this just helps torpedo the thought that this is a legitimate love poem for anyone other than the poet.

 

Quote #3

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st (11-12)

In the thoughts accompanying lines 1-2 above, we mentioned how the "love poem" feels a bit hollow and falls flat in the first two lines, as the poet just doesn’t seem to be able to turn his love into beautiful language. Well, we see in lines 11-12 that he is fully capable of turning his love into beautiful, richly imagistic language. The thing is, he reveals his true love here: himself, or the guy who can fend off death.

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee (13-14)

Remember when we thought this might be a love poem? Well, the last two lines seal it: this is a poem about living, not loving. Note the repetition of "lives" and "life" in the final line. There’s nothing here about love, except for implied self-love on the part of the speaker.

SONNET 18 LITERATURE AND WRITING QUOTES

 

Quote #1

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (1)

From the get-go, we can tell that this is going to be a poem about writing poems. In most other poems you read, the poet’s just going to go ahead and tell you what he wants to tell you, but here the speaker feels compelled to ask if he should go ahead with the whole thing. It’s almost as if he’s including the beloved and (since we read the poem) the audience in the construction of the poem, asking for our input. Then, of course, there’s the fact that this is an empty offer of a question – neither the beloved nor we in the audience can possibly change the course of the poem, and we might even see this opening line as a bit of arrogance.

 

Quote #2

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st (11-12)

Here’s where the poem starts to move into more meta territory, bringing out that central issue of immortality through artistic representation. First we get to see a real-life example of artistic immortality, as lots of readers will recognize the "death" through whose "shade" we wander from another famous work of literature: the Bible (and specifically Psalm 23:4). Here’s a character who seems to have gained some literary immortality, since so many people read the Bible. Then the speaker gets even more assertive, contending that the beloved will "grow" in "eternal lines to time." That phrase "lines to time" is definitely a description of poetry, since poems are lines of words set to a rhythm, or time, so the poet’s pointing toward eternal life through poetry.

 

Quote #3

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (13-14)

Well, these are some of the most famous lines in all of Shakespeare, and for good reason. Here’s the poet’s deserved arrogance in all of its glory: as long as people keep reading, this poem will stay alive, and, in turn, so will the object of the poem, the beloved. Note here he makes the tacit assumption that as long as people are reading, they’ll be reading his poem. Cocky stuff.

SONNET 18 TIME QUOTES

Quote #1

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date (4)

The basic idea here is simple: the time summer occupies during the year is too short, as it has to give way to the other seasons. But "during the year" isn’t the only time frame one can look at. In fact, the bigger the span of time you look at, the more summer there is, since summer happens every year. In a sense, then, summer actually is immortal, even though the poet will go on to contrast his beloved’s "eternal summer" with the natural summer.

 

Quote #2

And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d (7-8)

We considered calling this theme "Fate and Free Will," because the main issue the poet has with time is that it imposes a fate on people, just as it does nature. Like summer, which can’t last all year, beauty can’t last an entire lifetime, as time will eventually catch up with you (or you could go the plastic surgery route). It is only through something eternal like poetry that man can escape, to any extent, the fate imposed by time.

 

Quote #3

But thy eternal summer shall not fade……
When in eternal lines to time though grow’st (9 and 12)

Nothing new here, but it’s worth noting the repetition of "eternal." This isn’t a poem that tosses words around lightly, so repeating a word means it’s very, very important.

 

Quote #4

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (13-14)

These lines sound really spot-on, don’t they? Tough to argue with lines as forceful and neat as these are. Plus the idea is cool: the poet can grant immortality. But it’s crucial that we treat these lines critically and not just accept them as drops of Shakespearean life-wisdom. First of all, how come he assumes that as long as men breathe or eyes can see (note the "or" – what if eyes could see but men couldn’t breathe?), this poem will continue to be read? We do still read it, but there’s no guarantee that people will keep reading these sonnets, and once they stop, the beloved would cease to exist. It seems like his or her immortality is pretty tenuous. Plus, we’ve got to wonder what kind of "life" he thinks the beloved will have. He or she certainly won’t be conscious, and will only be recognized as how the poet describes him or her. All we’ve got to go there is "more lovely and more temperate" than the summer. If that’s all the beloved reduces to, it’s really not much of a life.

 

SONNET 18 MAN AND THE NATURAL WORLD QUOTES

Quote #1

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? 
Thou art more lovely and more temperate (1-2)

At the start, we’re told that this will be a poem putting man and the natural world side by side for comparison, and apparently an attempt to favor man over the summer’s day. Let’s see how that develops:

 

Quote #2

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 (2-6)

At first glance, these lines look like the poet is bashing summer, in favor of "thee," who is "more lovely and more temperate." That’s true enough, as he’s definitely complaining about summer, but pay close attention to how he words these complaints. He says that winds "shake" "darling buds," that summer has a "lease," that heaven has an "eye," and that that eye, the sun, has a "complexion," which implies a face. What do all of those quoted words have in common? They’re all ways of describing humans or their actions. In other words, he can only describe nature by personifying it. This is especially pointed in the words "temperate" and "complexion," since they can both describe states of human health (at least as understood in Shakespeare’s time). If you had a good temperament and complexion, your internal humours, or various liquids, were in good proportions. So basically, even if nature is a little less lovely than a human, they clearly are made of the same things and subject to the same rules.

 

Quote #3

And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d (7-8)

Here the poet makes the similarities even more clear. He’s stopped trying to differentiate between man and nature at all, and instead points toward their universal similarity: they’re both slaves to time.

SONNET 18 MAN AND THE NATURAL WORLD QUOTES

Quote #1

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? 
Thou art more lovely and more temperate (1-2)

At the start, we’re told that this will be a poem putting man and the natural world side by side for comparison, and apparently an attempt to favor man over the summer’s day. Let’s see how that develops:

 

Quote #2

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 (2-6)

At first glance, these lines look like the poet is bashing summer, in favor of "thee," who is "more lovely and more temperate." That’s true enough, as he’s definitely complaining about summer, but pay close attention to how he words these complaints. He says that winds "shake" "darling buds," that summer has a "lease," that heaven has an "eye," and that that eye, the sun, has a "complexion," which implies a face. What do all of those quoted words have in common? They’re all ways of describing humans or their actions. In other words, he can only describe nature by personifying it. This is especially pointed in the words "temperate" and "complexion," since they can both describe states of human health (at least as understood in Shakespeare’s time). If you had a good temperament and complexion, your internal humours, or various liquids, were in good proportions. So basically, even if nature is a little less lovely than a human, they clearly are made of the same things and subject to the same rules.

 

Quote #3

And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d (7-8)

Here the poet makes the similarities even more clear. He’s stopped trying to differentiate between man and nature at all, and instead points toward their universal similarity: they’re both slaves to time.

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 (9-12)

While the opening lines suggested that the poet would pit man and the natural world in competition, here we realize that the poet is placing man and the natural world together against time. It turns out, as we saw in all of the previous lines, that man and nature actually have tons in common, and even if the poet set up the comparison to find differences, he mainly finds similarities. Changing tack, then, he groups man and nature together in a fight against fate and time.

Quote #5

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee (13-14)

By the end of the poem, poetry itself has become part of the natural world, as the poem’s continued "life" is the key to keeping "thee" alive.

SONNET 18 QUESTIONS

Bring on the tough stuff - there’s not just one right answer.

1.      Who is "thee"?

2.      Does this poem necessarily keep living so long as humans keep breathing? Is the speaker right?

3.      Lines 8 and 12 seem to do a bit of foreshadowing. Why? Why not just surprise us with the turn and the couplet?

4.      What’s up with all of the personification?