Text analysis: Shakespeare, sonnet 18

“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”

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 heavenshines,
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.

Analysis:

Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare has no title, but even so we can make some conjectures considering the first line (“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”). The reader immediately notices that there's the presence of a lyric I (“shall I”) that speaks to an interlocutor (“compare thee”) and the imagine of a Summer's day creates a positive and bright atmosphere. So, the reader may imagine that the person the lyric eye is talking to shares some characteristics with Summer, even though the question mark at the end of the line makes the reader think about the reason why the poet isn't sure about comparing this man or woman to a Summer's day.

Considering the layout, the reader understands it's a sonnet because it's made up of fourteen lines. In particular, it is arranged into three quatrains ( in which the first line rhymes with the third line and the second one with the last one ) and a rhyming couplet, following the model of the Elizabethan sonnet.

The central problem discussed by the poet in this sonnet is expressed in the first line: “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”. In the following lines the poet describes the positive characteristics in which the person he is referring to overcomes Summer: this woman or man is much “more lovely and more temperate”. Shakespeare also tells about some negative aspects of this season: he says it's not true that during the Summer it's always sunny and warm, because it's often windy in the month of May, when “rough winds do shake the darling buds”, and adds that this period of the year is too short.

In the second stanza the poet keeps on listing the defects of Summer, saying that sometimes the sun is too hot and that every beauty and fair has to decline sooner or later, because of “nature's changing course” or “by chance”.

This theme connects the second stanza with the third one, in which there is an opposition between the shortness of Summer and the “eternal summer” of the person the poet is referring to. This opposition is strongly underlined by the conjunction “but”, right at the beginning of the third quatrain.

Indeed, the poet says this person will never lose his or her beauty and that “Death will never bring him or her under his shade”, because he or she will always live through Shakespeare's lines.

The poem ends with the rhyming couplet that resumes the content of the previous stanzas and, in particular, the content of the third quatrain: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee”.

That means that as long as there's a living human being who can read this sonnet, this poem is immortal and, through Shakespeare's lines, gives life to the person the poet is referring to.

On a semantic level, the reader may notice that most of the lexicon is connected to Summer and to the characteristics of this season and this contributes to create a positive and sunny atmosphere (“hot”, “heaven”, “shines”, “gold”,...).

Furthermore, the verb tense used in all the stanzas is Present Simple. In this way, the poet might have wanted to underline the aspect of eternity, which can be also seen as an eternal present.

On a syntactical level, there are some deviations regarding the order of words. For example, the reader con see that in the second stanzas there's a verb at the end of each line and the general order of the construction of phrases isn't respected. Perhaps the poet wanted to give emphasis to these verbs, or maybe he only found a way to respect the rhyme scheme.

As regards figures of speech, the reader may immediately notice the metaphor in line 5 referred to the Sun, which is seen as “the eye of heaven”.

In addition, one can see that the poet used a lot the rhetorical figure of anaphora (lines 6-7 “and”, lines 10-11 “nor, lines 13-14 “so long”) to underline the various passages of his argumentation: the first anaphora is used to connect the defects attributed to Summer by the poet, the second one refers to the difference between the shortness of this season and the immortality of the person through Shakespeare's lines and the last one (“so long”) underlines the concept expressed in the rhyming couplet that as long as there is someone who can read this poem, the person mentioned by the poet will live.