SHALL I COMPARE THEE

by William Sheakspear

"Sonnet 18" is a sonnet written by William Shakespeare in 1609 and it belongs to the sequence dedicated to the “fair youth”. Looking at the layout, we can understand that it is a sonnet by the arrangement in three quatrains and a couplet with an alternate rhyme scheme that ends with GG in the couplet.

This sonnet doesn’t come with a title but it is easy to understand its content by reading the first line: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”. First of all we can see the presence of a lyrical I (“I”) that wants to compare another person (“thee”) with a summer’s day.

By the use of the question mark and the verb “shall” we can understand that the lyrical I is not sure if he can really compare that person with a summer’s day.

 

In the next three lines of the first quatrain the poet highlighted the fact that the subject is more lovely and temperate than summer and that this season is hit by rough winds and it is too short. By this description the intelligent reader can understand that the other therm of the comparison is not a normal person but the lover of the lyrical I.

The second quatrain introduces the characteristic of the first term of comparison: the summer’s days. What the lyrical I does is to point out all the negative side of that saying that “it is too hot the eye of heaven”. This is both a metaphor and a personification in fact “the eye of heaven” stands for the Sun which “gold complexion dimm’d” that means that it’s colour fades away. The word “complexion” is normally used for humans, but in this case is applied to the Sun, so it is a personification. What is more it changes the beauty of the beautiful things that means that everything has to die sooner or later by chance or by the nature course.

The third quatrain open with the adversative conjunction “but” in order to describe the characteristics of his beloved in contraposition with the one of the summer’s day. The lyrical I says that “thy eternal summer shall not fade”, this is metaphor that stand for the beauty of the woman, a type of beauty that is eternal. What is more there is a personification of the word “Death” achieved by the use of the capital letter and the expression “shall … brag”.Her beauty will survive also thanks to the lines of the poet.

Lastly, the couplet resumes the topics of the quatrains and expresses a clear message: as long as people have eyes to read this poem (that is, to the end of the world) this poem will exist making the poet’s love eternal.

The intelligent reader realises that the poet’s stylistic choice to exploit the semantic field of the nature on one side and the fields of time in the other helps and adds the development of the problematic situation he is going to express. In addition, the atmosphere created by this terms makes it positive and bright.