Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

The passage

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.

Sonnet 18

In plain English

Should I compare you to a summer’s day? You are lovelier and more even-tempered. In May, rough winds shake the buds, and summer is over far too quickly. Sometimes the sun is too hot, and often it is clouded over. Everything beautiful eventually loses its beauty, either by accident or through the ordinary course of nature. But your summer will never fade. You will not lose the beauty you own, and Death will not boast that you walk in his shadow, because you will live on in these lines for as long as time lasts. As long as people are alive to read, this poem will live, and it will keep you alive.

Where it comes in the sequence

Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets were published together in 1609. The first 126 are addressed to a young man, usually called the Fair Youth, and Sonnet 18 belongs to that group. The poem itself never says whether the beloved is a man or a woman. The Sonnets study guide explains the shape of the whole sequence.

Its position matters. The first seventeen sonnets urge the young man to marry and have children so that his beauty will survive him. Sonnet 18 changes the plan. It no longer asks him to do anything. Beauty will be preserved by the poet’s own verse. From this point the sequence becomes more intimate, and the theme of poetry outlasting time returns again and again, most grandly in Sonnet 55: Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.

Close reading

A question, then a refusal

The poem opens with a question and answers it at once. The comparison is offered and then turned down, because the beloved is more lovely and more temperate. That second adjective is carefully chosen. temperate describes mild weather, but also a moderate, self-controlled character. The beloved is being praised for steadiness as much as for looks, and steadiness is exactly what summer lacks.

The next six lines are a list of summer’s faults. It is violent: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, where the tender word darling makes the wind seem a bully. It is brief: summer’s lease hath all too short a date. This is the language of property law. Summer does not own its season; it rents it, and the lease runs out. It is extreme: the sun, personified as the eye of heaven, is either too hot or has his gold complexion dimmed.

Line 7 states the general law behind these complaints: every fair from fair sometime declines. The word fair appears twice in different senses, first meaning a beautiful thing and then meaning beauty itself. Every beautiful thing falls away from its beauty, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed. To trim is to adorn, so to be untrimmed is to be stripped of decoration.

The turn

A Shakespearean sonnet has fourteen lines of iambic pentameter arranged as three quatrains (four-line units) and a closing couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. Most sonnets have a volta, a turn in the argument. Here it comes at line 9, announced by a single word: But thy eternal summer shall not fade. The first eight lines dealt with real weather. Now summer becomes a metaphor for the beloved’s prime, and the verbs change from the present tense of observation to the confident future of shall not.

The legal language returns. The beloved will not lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, where ow’st means “own”. Summer only had a lease; the beloved holds beauty outright. Then Death is personified as a boaster: Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade. Death is reduced to a braggart who is about to be disappointed.

Line 12 explains how. The beloved will escape When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st. The lines are lines of verse. And grow’st is a gardener’s verb: the beloved is grafted onto time like a cutting onto a living tree. The poem has moved from buds shaken off the branch to a growth that will not die.

The couplet

The final two lines are bound together by anaphora, the repetition of an opening phrase: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this. They are made almost wholly of monosyllables, which gives them the plain weight of a guarantee. The vital word is this. It points at the poem on the page in front of you. Whenever you read it, you are part of the evidence that the promise has been kept.

What it tells us about the Sonnets

The great enemy in the Sonnets is Time, and Sonnet 18 is one of the first poems to claim a victory over it. But look at what kind of victory it is. By the end, the poem is as interested in itself as in the beloved. The last line makes the poem the giver of life and the beloved the one who receives it. There is pride here, and perhaps a kind of possessiveness too: the beloved lives on the poet’s terms.

There is also an honest gap in the claim. We finish the poem knowing nothing concrete about the person it praises: not a feature, not a name. What survives is the poet’s voice and the fact of his love, not a portrait. A thoughtful essay can ask whether the poem really does what it promises. Compare the humbler, more anxious hope in Sonnet 65, That in black ink my love may still shine bright, where immortality is called a miracle and not a certainty.

Read beside Sonnet 116, the poem shows a pattern. Both sonnets define something lasting by listing what it is not, and both stake everything on the couplet. And where Juliet in “What’s in a name?” distrusts words, this sonnet puts its whole faith in them.

Sonnets suit short daily reading better than almost anything else Shakespeare wrote. This is the kind of passage Daily Bard shows on a single leaf: the verse on the front, a plain-English reading on the back.

What people get wrong

• “It compares the beloved to a summer’s day.” It does the opposite. The comparison is raised in line 1 and rejected in line 2. The poem is an argument that summer is not good enough.
• “It is addressed to a woman.” The sonnet sits among the poems to the Fair Youth. The text itself gives no gender, and you should say so, not assume.
• “Summer means June to August.” The darling buds of May belong to summer here. In Shakespeare’s England, May was reckoned a summer month.

Using it in an essay

The strongest answers follow the argument through the form. Show what each quatrain does, name the volta, and explain how the couplet changes the meaning of what came before. The close reading toolkit gives a sequence of questions to ask of any poem, and the guide to Shakespeare’s language covers “thee”, “thou” and verb endings such as grow’st.

Fragments worth memorising:

• more lovely and more temperate - the comparison is refused; steadiness is the praise.
• summer’s lease hath all too short a date - legal metaphor for the brevity of beauty.
• But thy eternal summer shall not fade - the volta, where literal summer becomes metaphor.
• in eternal lines - verse as the means of survival.
• So long lives this - the poem points at itself.

For classroom use, the Sonnets lesson plans include a full sequence on form and argument, and the Sonnets quotation sheet sets the key lines from the most-taught poems on one page. When you plan a comparative answer, the essay planner will help you organise it by idea and not by poem.

If you want a steady supply of passages to live with, the Daily Bard app for iPhone and iPad offers one a day, each verified against the Folger text. In the Full Edition, Daily Bard’s Commonplace Book keeps every page you have seen, which is useful when you come back to revise.