Today’s Poem: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thy eternal summer shall not fade

Evelyn De Morgan, Sunbeam and Summer Shower, 1914 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

by William 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 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.
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What can we say about Sonnet 18, as famous a poem as any in English? Commentators have teased out every possible nuance in Shakespeare’s paean to a beautiful youth (the Fair Youth, whom he urges to have children in Sonnet 1) — beginning with the irony that the Fair Youth actually gets little description. All the descriptive energy is for the summer’s day, with merely the assertion that the youth surpasses it. The metaphor floods the metaphrand.

Still, we might mention the famous opening question, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” And notice that the answer is mostly no. Oh, literally the answer is yes. The poem obviously compares him to a summer day. But all that is in service of saying that the comparison doesn’t fit. The Fair Youth is “more lovely and more temperate.” The summer sun is not always the right temperature, and sometimes it clouds over, its “gold complexion dimm’d.” Summer, too, gives way to fall, but “thy eternal summer shall not fade.” Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Turns out, no.

We could spend hours simply on the language of Sonnet 18. English is full of stray quotations and references; E.D. Hirsch built an entire educational industry out of the claim, in his 1987 book Cultural Literacy, that such shared knowledge is the very definition of culture. And it’s perhaps worth nothing that Hirsch’s first example is from an old business letter, written by a relative, that suggests quick closing of a deal because “There is a tide . . .” Hirsch wants a world in which ordinary businessmen can communicate complex thoughts in the brief tags of shared cultural knowledge, as in that letter’s four-word reference to Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

A good percentage of these cultural tags are remembered simply because they are in the cultural storehouse: We should know them because they are widely known. But Shakespeare is full of lines that are not just remembered because they’re remembered but also because they’re good. In today’s Sonnet 18, for example, “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May” has a flow and sound that plants it in the mind, akin to Sonnet 73’s “Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

Cobbe Portrait, possibly of Shakespeare, discovered in 2006

There’s also a question of how to interpret the beginning of Line 9, “But thy eternal summer . . . ” The form of the Petrarchan sonnet typically involves a volta, a shift in the meaning, at the ninth line, with a change in rhyme scheme indicating the transition: ABBA ABBA, for the opening octave, followed by something like CDE CDE for the sestet.

The Shakespearian sonnet-form, however, makes up its fourteen lines from three quatrains and a concluding couplet, typically rhymed ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. And what role could a volta play in this scheme? The most natural place would be with the couplet, but that risks the last two lines seeming merely tacked on to a twelve-line poem.

In Sonnet 18, the opening “But” of Line 9 could signal a Petrarchan turn to a shift in tone or meaning — exactly where Petrarch would have placed it. And the advantage of reading the poem as an octave and sestet is that the final couplet isn’t left free-floating. The Fair Youth’s eternal summer shall not fade, and Death shall not brag of him, because the sonnet itself preserves him — the poet’s vast claim for the power of poetry: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

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