keats

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.
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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. (142)
Note that James Boyd-White refers to the beloved as "her", but it is almost universally accepted by scholars that the poet's love interest is a young man in sonnets 1-126.
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Summary
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.”
Commentary
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 effects 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.”
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Sonnet 18 is among the most famous of Shakespeare’s works and is believed by many to be one of the greatest love poems of all time. Like other sonnets, it is written in iambic pentameter form, consisting of four quatrains and a rhyming couplet. It deals with the theme of beauty and the way it is affected by time. In this sonnet, Shakespeare also boasts to have the power to preserve his love’s beauty through poetry which has lead critics such as James Boyd-White to claim that it is actually ‘one long exercise in self-glorification’ rather than a love poem.
The sonnet begins with conveying the beauty of Shakespeare’s love. It is notable that their physical features are not actually described – we are told nothing specific of how they look – instead Shakespeare compares his love to a summer’s day and concludes that their beauty is greater than that of summer and the sun. The poem opens with the famous complimentary question:
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
This question is flattering in itself as a summer’s day is often associated with beauty. Shakespeare, however, explains that his love’s beauty exceeds that of the summer and does not have its tendency towards unpleasant extremes:
“Thou art more lovely and more temperate:”
Shakespeare makes specific criticisms of the summer: its beauty is spoiled by strong winds and it disappoints us by being too short:
“Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date”
It should be noted that at the time the sonnet was written, England had not yet adopted the Gregorian calendar and May was considered a summer month. In the above quote, Shakespeare describes the fragility and short duration of summer’s beauty. The use of the word ‘lease’ reminds us of the fact that everything beautiful remains so for a limited time only and after a while its beauty will be forcibly taken away.
In the second quatrain, Shakespeare continues his criticisms of the summer. At this point, however, he focuses on the imperfection of the sun and explains that it is temporary and, like other aspects of the summer, tends towards unpleasant extremes:
“Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,”
Shakespeare states that the sun, which he personifies and refers to as ‘the eye of heaven’, can be too hot or blocked from view by the clouds unlike his ‘more temperate’ love.
In the second quatrain Shakespeare poses his problem fairly explicitly: every beauty will fade either by chance or through the natural course of time:
“And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed”
The repetition of the word ‘fair’ highlights the fact that this fate is inescapable for everything that possesses beauty. Shakespeare, however, states that his love will not lose their beauty to death or time but will be preserved through his poetry:

“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”
Shakespeare’s self-assured claim makes it possible to argue that the purpose of the poem was not actually to pay a beloved person a compliment but rather to praise oneself for poetic skill. Evidence of Shakespeare writing this poem for the purpose of praising himself occurs subtly throughout the entire text. In the very first line, for example, due to the rhythmic structure the word ‘I’ is emphasised whereas the word ‘thee’ is not. This suggests that Shakespeare wanted to focus on himself rather than on his love. Likewise in the third quatrain, he personifies death and states that it will not ‘brag’ to power over Shakespeare’s love – this could be interpreted as Shakespeare stating that he will be the one who brags rather than death. Critics have also argued that since Shakespeare chose not to describe his love’s physical features, he was more concerned about praising himself rather than his love.

In conclusion, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 successfully conveys the themes of beauty and the effect of time on it through a variety of poetic techniques and effective use of the iambic pentameter structure. This sonnet, however, very possibly should not be regarded as a love poem due to the fact that Shakespeare has clearly aimed to draw a lot of attention to himself as the poet and that his description of his beloved’s beauty did not include much detail.

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” is a classic poem by the legendary William Shakespeare. This poem is his eighteenth sonnet, and perhaps the most well-known out of all Shakespeare’s fifty four sonnets. With the renowned writing style and techniques, Shakespeare has made the meaning of this love poem so intriguing. The chosen subject matter, describing the theme of love has created a remarkable longevity for this poem until these days. The content mentioned above, along with the context, tone and an array of literary devices will be analyzed thoroughly in this essay.
The title “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” partially conveys the theme of the appreciation of beauty, and the sense of falling in love. Hypothetically, the personal context of this poem is Shakespeare falling in love with a remarkably attractive woman. Through the comparison of this woman’s good looks with the nature of “a summer’s day”, the subject matter appears to be Shakespeare being truly infatuated by the loveliness of this lady. The theme suggested is the eternal love and beauty. Due to the historical context being in the 17th century, the language of this poem is old English, which is formal and complex. The tone of this sonnet is very elegant and suavely romantic, which creates a heart-warming mood for the readers. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” is a lyrical poem, comprising complete features of sonnet form. It has fourteen lines in total, divided into three quatrains then followed by a couplet. Almost every line in this sonnet directly conveys the subject matter with many clear and vivid images. The rhyme scheme is structured in order: abab cdcd efef gg. Throughout this poem, the use of imagery can be seen many times, through the vivid image of the woman’s beauty compared to the glow summer. The poem starts with a rhetorical question “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” which implies adoration to his beloved. Then the next line is the admiration for this woman’s magnificence with two adjectives “lovely” and “moderate”. The selection of these two words makes this woman’s good look seems very pleasant but also magnificent. There’s a repetition of the word “more” before the two adjectives, which increases the effect of praising the loveliness of this lady. The next two lines “Rough winds do shake the darling bush of May”, “And summer lease hath all too short a date” expresses the negative aspect of summer. Shakespeare’s use of imagery for “rough winds” implies that the tempestuous weather is ruining the joy of summer and fades the splendor away. Then it’s followed by the complaint of summer passes too quickly, which metaphorically suggests that all beauty is only temporary, all pleasant thing must come to an end at some point. The second quatrain addresses about the nature of summer and beauty in general. The fifth and sixth lines have brilliant personifications of the sun as “the eyes of heaven” and “his golden complexion”. They implicitly describe the characteristics on a face, with the use of imagery and metaphor. The next two lines refer to an unavoidable truth that all beautiful things will eventually grow fainter as time goes by, and because of the strenuous encounters in life. “And every fair from fair sometime declines” “By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:” Shakespeare uses the alliteration, as well as repetition “fair from fair” to emphasize the attractiveness fading away. He has combined proficiently two literary devices in just three words. The ninth line deliberately shows a complete contrast idea: “But thy eternal Summer shall not fade” describes the beauty that will stay for eternity, and will always remain the quality and prolonged existence. The repetition of “nor” has the effect of emphasizing that nothing can decline the gorgeousness of this lady that Shakespeare adored. The couplet, which is the last two lines of the poem also contain a repetition “So long as”. The aim is to reveal the everlasting beauty of Shakespeare’s beloved. He also used hyperbole “men can breathe….eyes can see” to exaggerate the significance of her exquisiteness to him. The hyperbole also refers to the longevity of this poem: as long as there are people still alive to read poems this sonnet will live, and you will live in it. Through the sophisticated language and description of his beloved, Shakespeare has shown his joy of being deeply in love with a beautiful woman. It is very skillful of this renowned writer to use the image of the bright summer to compare with the eternal beauty of this woman. The imagery has expressed entirely the subject matter and theme of this romantic sonnet. Not only does Shakespeare believe that immortality exist through the beauty, it also stays in his poem. Truly, this love sonnet has elapsed through so many generations, and his premise for the endless beauty has come true.