Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? | Introduction to Literature

William Shakespeare

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.

INTRODUCTION

This is the eighteenth poem in William Shakesepare’s huge series of sonnets published in 1609. By that time, Shakespeare was already a hot shot, with his most famous plays behind him. So, over a couple of years, Shakespeare sat down and wrote (get this) 154 of these little poems. All of them are sonnets, but Sonnet 18 is probably the most famous and widely read.

Why? First, it’s the perfect example of the sonnet form, so it’s great for teaching, but it’s also a great point of access for one of the major issues in all of Shakespeare: the weird relationship between an author, his subject matter, and his audience. Shakespeare’s really into messing with how stories are told, and how different kinds of storytelling can affect the content of the stories. He brought his A-game to this sonnet. 

Shakespeare's sonnets are considered a treasure trove for trying to understand his personal life. Not much is known about the guy, but scholars have made tons of inferences based largely on these poems. The first seventeen sonnets are thought to be Shakespeare addressing a young man and telling him to go make some babies. The last sonnets are thought to be written to Shakespeare’s mistress, whom scholars awesomely call the "Dark Lady." The middle poems, though, of which Sonnet 18 is the first, are generally thought to be love poems directed at a young man (check out Sonnet 20, where this is more obvious). What’s the nature of this love? Paternal? Brotherly? Affectionate? Sexual? You decide.

SUMMARY

The speaker begins by asking whether he should or will compare "thee" to a summer day. He says that his beloved is more lovely and more even-tempered. He then runs off a list of reasons why summer isn’t all that great: winds shake the buds that emerged in Spring, summer ends too quickly, and the sun can get too hot or be obscured by clouds.

He goes on, saying that everything beautiful eventually fades by chance or by nature’s inevitable changes. Coming back to the beloved, though, he argues that his or her summer (or happy, beautiful years) won’t go away, nor will his or her beauty fade away. Moreover, death will never be able to take the beloved, since the beloved exists in eternal lines (meaning poetry). The speaker concludes that as long as humans exist and can see (so as to read), the poem he’s writing will live on, allowing the beloved to keep living as well.

Lines 1-2

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? 

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

• The speaker starts by asking or wondering out loud whether he ought to compare whomever he’s speaking to with a summer’s day.
• 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.
• "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."
• 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?).
• 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.
• 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.
• What can we tell about the relationship between the speaker and his addressee from the way he addresses "thee"?
• 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.
• So is he just wondering out loud here, pretending "thee" is present?
• 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.
• Finally, just a note on the meter here:
• 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."
• 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:

• 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.
• Basically, strong summer winds threaten those new flower buds that popped up in May, and summer just doesn’t last very long.
• 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.
• The point here is clear enough: the summer is fated to end.
• 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?
• 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;

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

• 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.
• Now what exactly does "untrimm’d" refer to?
• 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.
• 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."
• Here, then, we are subtly prepped for the turn we’re about to see in…

Lines 9-10

But thy eternal summer shall not fade, 

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

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

• The couplet, in the end, is really just a fuller admission of what the speaker points toward in line 12.
• 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.
• 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.
• In other words: as long as men live and can read, this poem will continue to live, and so keep "thee" alive.
• 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."
• 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?
• 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.
• In fact, we ought to wonder whether it is "thee" who will be alive, or rather the poet’s (very limited) representation of "thee."
• 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?
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• The last lines, then, can be read as circular: "so long as mankind lives, mankind will continue to live."
• 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.