SONNET 18

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.

Right from the title the reader can understand the sonnet belongs to a collection, indeed the title is composed by the number 18.

The sonnet belongs to the section of “the marriage sonnet”.

It follows the Shakespeare form of sonnet, it is organized into three quatrains and one rhyming couplet.

The first line introduces the argument of all sonnet with a rhetorical question: the speaking voice wants to know if he can compare someone (thee) with summer’s day; but even if it is a rhetorical question the poet already knows the answer.

The reader can be also curious to find out who the speaking voice refers to: the reader maybe presupposes the speaking voice refers to a fairy youth.

This thesis is confirmed by the second line: the speaking voice thinks his lover doesn’t be compared with a summer day because he is “lovely and more temperate”. The use of majority comparative underlines the higher degree where he places the fair youth.

So even if “summer’s day” recalls the semantic field of heat, happiness, life, it seems less perfect than his lover.

A better explanation of the speaking voice’s thinking is on the following lines. As the first argument to support his thesis the poet writes: winds sometimes shake buds of May. So even nature can sometimes shows its negative side.

The word “do” underlines the importance of “shake”, that is the action with which winds assume a meaning of aggressiveness. In addition, even the alliteration of sound “d” returns sense of ferocious nature.

On the last line of first quatrain the speaking voice introduces the passing of time, so even if summer belong to semantic field of good qualities (such heat, happiness and life) it is subject to the process of time.

The coherence between the second and first quatrain is given by the “:”, thanks to it the reader can understand the first quatrain is better explained on the second one.

The use of semantic field of nature in the second quatrain recalls the first one, even if the second adds more metaphors to argue the speaking voice’s point of view such “eye of heaven”, “gold complexion dimm'd”, “ fair” ,“fair sometime declines” ,“chance”. So , more over the semantic field of nature and passing of time, the speaking voice creates others : he presents anthropological semantic field and the chance. So the reader can understand better the world’s conception.

In the latest lines the theme is the ravages of time again predominates; it recalls the previous one (such “And every fair from fair sometime declines”).

Even if his lover is subject to passing of time the poet tries to eternalize the fair youth’s beauty in his verse, in these "eternal lines." The reader can note it thanks to the financial imagery ("summer's lease") and the use of anaphora (the repetition of opening words) in lines 6-7, 10-11, and 13-14.

So the speaking voice, as the solution of his problem (the passing of time), tries to make his lover eternal and ask to him to have a child. Now the reader can understand why the sonnet belongs to composition called “the marriage sonnet” ,because the speaking voice wants to marry him.