Shall I compare thee to a summers day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate: The speaker starts by asking or wondering out loud whether he ought to compare whomever hes speaking to with a summers 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 summers 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 Shakespeares 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 particul ar 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 Shakespeares audience would have known that "temperate" mean t 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, wed just assume that the object of the poem is his lover, and leave it at that. But wi th 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 doesnt seem to care much wha t "thee" thinks. He does ask whether he ought to make this comparison, but he certainly doesnt 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" als o 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 summers 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 theyre kind of bouncy? Thats the iambic pentameter: "compare thee to a summers 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 whos going to be the real subject of this poem.

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Basically, strong summer winds threaten those new flower buds that popped up in May, and summer just doesnt last very long. The way he describes the short summer, though, is whats 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: t he summer is fated to end. But check this out: isnt 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? Isnt it, in a meaningful sense, immortal? Keep this in mind as you read on.

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Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmd;

Here comes the major personification of nature. Put simply, the speakers saying sometimes the sun is too hot, and other times you cant 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 were getting than we are about the beloved. Indeed, the speaker is carefully descri bing 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 someones 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. And every fair from fai r sometime declines, By chance, or natures changing course untrimmd; 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 "untrimmd" 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, "untrimmd" is also a term from sailing, as you "trim," or adjust, the sails to take advantage of the wind. This gives "untrimmd" a completely opposite meaning; instead of "made ugly and plain by natural changes, " it means "unchanged in the face of natures natural changes." Here, then, we are subtly prepped for the turn were about to see in

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Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summers lease hath all too short a date:

Here the speaker begins to pe rsonify nature. In other words, some of the smack talking hes doing about summer sounds like hes talking about a person.

But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou owst,

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The turn! Check out the "Form and Meter" section for more on line 9 in sonnets, but heres a classic example of a "turn." 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 inher ent in nature, the speaker pronounces that the beloved hes speaking to isnt subject to all of these rules hes laid out. The speaker argues that, unlike the real summer, his beloveds summer (by which he means beautiful, happy years) will never go away, nor will the beloved lose his/her beauty. 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 "summers day" are really quite similar. Both can fade away or, depending on how you look at it, be eternal, and both can be personified. Thats why here, at line 9, the poet switches directio n both the beloved and nature are threatened mainly by time, and it is only through this third force (poetry), that they can live on. Its also worth picking up on that word "owst." That apostrophe might be contracting "ownest" or "owest," and both work nicely. Either the beloved wont lose the beauty he/she possesses ("owns"), or wont have to return the beauty he/she borrowed from nature and now owes back. These readings both resonate well with line 4, in which the speaker described th e summer months as a "lease," or a temporary ownership that had to be returned.

Well thats exactly whats 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 audie nce, by continuing to read the poem, will try to make the beloved grow into a character, and in turn make him/her immortal.

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

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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, weve got some more personification: technically, eyes dont really "see," and poems certainly dont "live." Also, its worth noting the incredible arrogance here: why should we believe that as long as humankind exists, this poem will continue to live? Cant 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 t he beloved will be leading? This definitely doesnt sound like heaven. The beloved cant make any choices for his or her self, isnt conscious, and can only be recognized as the poet described him or her. In fact, we ought to wonder whether it is "thee" w ho will be alive, or rather the poets (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 summ er? 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, its 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 speakers 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? Thats 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. Doesnt that mean, then, that "thee," is the same as "us"? Trippy. Frankly, we think thats 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."

Nor shall death brag thou wanderst in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growst;

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In another bit of personification (so far weve had summer and the sun), the sp eaker introduces death. Death, the speaker claims, wont get a chance to claim the beloved in the valley of the shadow of death (this deaths shadow idea is from Psalm 23:4), since he/she is immortal. The general meaning of line 12 (youre 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. Here, then, the poet is making two bold claims: first, that his poem is "eternal," and secon d, that it nourishes and develops "thee," as it is where he/she is able to "grow." Now this willingness to discuss the fact that hes 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." Thats 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 theyre in a real world with four walls and no audience watching them. If the actors, however, recognize that theres an audience out there, theyre considered to be "breaking" through that fourth wall, as they try to do away with the artificiality of pretending theyre just living out a normal life up there on stage.

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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.

Themes 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