ANALYSIS OF THE SONNET XVIII – 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 dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest 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.

Even if this sonnet doesn't have a title, the reader may consider the first verse to hypothesize the argument of the text. From the very first sentence, the reader is intrigued and moved to going on reading. In fact he or she realizes that the question "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" serves to involve him/her and make him/her a participant of the argument of the sonnet because after reading it he or she will want to know the answer. Furthermore, to understand who is made the question to, he/she has apparently to going on reading.

A summer day can be, for some, inserted in a serene and free of worries atmosphere, but for others it may be a symbol of agony for something limited, which will have a time limit beyond which the happiness fades away. This is another element that convinces the reader to find out more about the argument.

Shakespeare chooses to use the word "thee" instead of "you" to immediately inform the player about his stylistic choices, probably based on the style of that time.

The text layout makes immediately clear to the reader that it's a Shakespearean or Elizabethan sonnet: it is made up of 14 verses, arranged into three quatrains and a rhyming couplet. The intelligent reader expects that in the quatrains the poet, Shakespeare, will expose three different aspects of his problem, while in the rhyming couplet he will propose a solution to this one. Moreover, simply by implementing the layout of the text, the reader can notice the typical rhyme of the Elizabethan or Shakespearean sonnet (abab cdcd efef gg). The presence of the lyric "I" in the question of the first verse highlights that this is a sonnet, a lyrical form of poetry that speaks about something personal and private.

From the reading of the first quatrain the reader might understand that the second hypothesis is correct, namely that the speaking voice, by using words "And summer's lease hath all too short a date" refers to the summer as something very short, that comes to an end.

The poet compares the unknown you to the summer starting with a difference that serves to praise him/her. Indeed he says that the person he is talking about is "temperate". This is in contrast with the climate of confusion that the speaking voice shows through the insertion in the text of bustling scenes: "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May".

The intelligent reader deduces that the poet does not have a positive view of the summer while he has one of the person he wants to talk about in the poem. This might make him/her think that the answer of the first verse is "No” because the unknown you is better than a summer's day. The key picture of this quatrain is the sound.

The second and third quatrain are connected because they speak about the same aspect, fostering the concept of the last verse of the first stanza (“And summer's lease hath all too short a date”). Indeed, the brevity and the suffering of the summer during which nature all wastes (line 7 and line 8), is opposed to the immutability and the infinity of the unknown you. The poet describes the summer as a season full of defects, and this contrasts with the perfection that he sees in the unknown you. To highlight this contrast, the poet inserts the word “but” at the beginning of the third quatrain.

Reading these two stanzas, the intelligent reader understands that behind the metaphor of the “eternal summer” (line 9) that Shakespeare hides his love, the guideline of his sonnets.

In the last two lines of this octave, Shakespeare explains how “Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest in his shade”: with his compositions.

The explanation, and then the solution of the problem, ends in the rhyming couplet: the poet carries on the argument that he began in the last quatrain saying that as long as there is a human able to see and talk, who reads his poem, his beloved won't lose life.

To highlight the eternity of his words, Shakespeare uses the Present Simple in the whole poem, the time that never ends.