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

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

By William Shakespeare - 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.

 

Since Memorial Day marks the unofficial start of summer, I thought I’d post what is arguably the most well-known use of summer in a poem. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" is one of my favorite of Shakespeare's sonnets. 

 

"Sonnet 18" is perhaps the best known of all of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, primarily due to the opening line, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," which every true romantic knows by heart. But there is much more to this line than meets the eye. "Sonnet 18" focuses on the loveliness of a friend or lover, with the speaker initially asking a rhetorical question about comparing their subject to a summer's day. He then goes on to introduce the pros and cons of the weather, mentioning both an idyllic English summer's day and the less-welcome dim sun and rough winds of autumn. In the end, it is insinuated this very piece of poetry will keep the lover—the poem's subject—alive forever and allow them to defy even death.

 

When I would teach “Sonnet 18,” I loved to compare it with “Sonnet 130,” also known as, “My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.” “Sonnet 130” is an unusual poem because it turns the idea of female beauty on its head and offers the reader an alternative view of what it's like to love a woman, warts and all, despite her shortcomings. It is basically the opposite of the more famous “Sonnet 18.”

 

It parodies other sonnets of the Elizabethan era, which were heavily into Petrarchan ideals, where the woman is continually praised and seen as beyond reproach. In this sense, 'Sonnet 130' is an anomaly, a unique poem that flouts the rules of convention and breaks new ground in the process. Shakespeare must have known what he was doing when he wrote this sonnet, because he ridicules an art form he himself had mastered. 

 

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130)

By William Shakespeare - 1564-1616

 

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.

     And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

     As any she belied with false compare.