12/30/2019 Sonnet 18 Summary

Sonnet 18
Sonnet 18 Summary
The speaker begins by asking whether he should or will compare "thee" to a summer day. He says that his beloved
i more lovely and more even-tempered. He then runs off a list of reasons why summer isn’t all that great: winds
shake the buds that emerged in Spring, summer ends too quickly, and the sun can get too hot or be obscured by
clouds.

He goes on, saying that everything beautiful eventually fades by chance or by nature’s inevitable changes. Coming
back to the beloved, though, he argues that his or her summer (or happy, beautiful years) won’t go away, nor will
his or her beauty fade away. Moreover, death will never be able to take the beloved, since the beloved exists in
eternal lines (meaning poetry). The speaker concludes that as long as humans exist and can see (so as to read), the
poem he’s writing will live on, allowing the beloved to keep living as well.

· Section I (lines 1-8) Lines 1-2

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
The speaker starts by asking or wondering out loud whether he ought to compare whomever
he’s speaking to with a summer’s day.
Instead of musing on that further, he jumps right in, and gives us a thesis of sorts. The
object of his description is more "lovely" and more "temperate" than a summer’s day.
"Lovely" is easy enough, but how about that "temperate"? The meaning that comes to mind
first is just "even-keeled" or "restrained," but "temperate" also introduces, by way of a double meaning,
the theme of internal and external "weather." "Temperate," as you might have heard on the Weather
Channel, refers to an area with mild temperatures, but also, in Shakespeare’s time, would have referred
to a balance of the "humours."
No need to explain this in great detail, but basically doctors since Ancient Greece had
believed that human behavior was dictated by the relative amount of particular kinds of
fluids in the body (if you must know, they were blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm.
Yummy, no?).
By the early 1600s, this theory was being strongly challenged, but people in Shakespeare’s
audience would have known that "temperate" meant that someone had the right amount of
those different fluids. The other important (and less disgusting) issue these lines bring up is
the question of "thee." Normally, we’d just assume that the object of the poem is his lover,
and leave it at that. But with Shakespeare, these things are always complicated.
What can we tell about the relationship between the speaker and his addressee from the way
he addresses "thee"?
For the moment, all we can really tell is this: the speaker doesn’t seem to care much what
"thee" thinks. He does ask whether he ought to make this comparison, but he certainly
doesn’t wait long (or at all) for an answer.
So is he just wondering out loud here, pretending "thee" is present?
Even better, and this is important, could "thee" also be us readers? Is it just us, or does some
small part of you imagine that Shakespeare might be asking you, the reader, whether you
want him to compare you to a summer’s day? Keep that on the back burner as you go
through the poem.
Finally, just a note on the meter here:

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Go ahead and read those first two lines out loud. Notice how they’re kind of bouncy? That’s the iambic
pentameter: "compare thee to a summer’s day."
So do you want to see a cool bit of foreshadowing? The pronoun "I" is a stressed syllable in the first line,
but the pronoun "Thou" is unstressed in the second line. Guess who’s going to be the real subject of this
poem.
Lines 3-4
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Here the speaker begins to personify nature. In other words, some of the smack talking he’s
doing abou summer sounds like he’s talking about a person.
Basically, strong summer winds threaten those new flower buds that popped up in May, and
summer just doesn’t last very long.
The way he describes the short summer, though, is what’s interesting. Summer has a "lease"
on the weather, just as your family might have a lease on your car; like a person, summer
can enter into, and must abide by, agreements.
The point here is clear enough: the summer is fated to end.
But check this out: isn’t summer also fated to begin every year once again? Can the summer
possibly have "too short a date," if it happens an infinite number of times? Isn’t it, in a
meaningful sense, immortal?
Keep this in mind as you read on.

Lines 5-6
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
Here comes the major personification of nature. Put simply, the speaker’s saying sometimes
the sun is too hot, and other times you can’t even see it at all (hidden, we assume, by
clouds).
But instead of being boring, he calls the sun the "eye of heaven," refers to it using the word
"his," and gives it a "complexion," which generally means refers to the skin of the face.
Check out how much more information about the summer we’re getting than we are about
the beloved. Indeed, the speaker is carefully describing the summer individually, and even
in human terms, while he only describes "thee" in one line and only relative to the summer.
"Complexion," in particular, is especially interesting, as it brings back the whole "humours"
theme we saw in "temperate."
"Complexion" used to be used to describe someone’s health, specifically with regard to their balance of
humours. Thus, we see here again that the speaker is combining descriptions of external weather
phenomena with internal balance.

Lines 7-8
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course
untrimm’d;
With these lines, the speaker gets even broader in his philosophy, declaring that everything
beautiful must eventually fade away and lose its charm, either by chance or by the natural
flow of time. Kind of like teen pop stars.
Now what exactly does "untrimm’d" refer to?
We might read it as what happens to "fair" or beautiful things. By that reading, things that
are beautiful eventually lose their trimmings, or their decorations, and thus fade from
beauty.

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On the other hand, "untrimm’d" is also a term from sailing, as you "trim," or adjust, the sails to take
advantage of the wind. This gives "untrimm’d" a completely opposite meaning; instead of "made ugly
and plain by natural changes," it means "unchanged in the face of nature’s natural changes." Here,
then, we are subtly prepped for the turn we’re about to see in…

· Section II (lines 9-14) Lines 9-10

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
The turn! Check out the "Form and Meter" section for more on line 9 in sonnets, but here’s
a classic example of a "turn."
Suddenly (though it was foreshadowed a bit in line 8), the tone and direction of the poem
changes dramatically. Moving on from bashing summer and the limitations inherent in
nature, the speaker pronounces that the beloved he’s speaking to isn’t subject to all of these
rules he’s laid out.
The speaker argues that, unlike the real summer, his beloved’s summer (by which he means
beautiful, happy years) will never go away, nor will the beloved lose his/her beauty.
But remember what we mentioned in line 4? The summer in real life actually is an "eternal
summer," since it comes back every year for all eternity. Just like we saw with all of the
personifications of nature in the previous lines, we begin to notice here that "thee" and the
"summer’s day" are really quite similar Both can fade away or, depending on how you look
at it, be eternal, and both can be personified. That’s why here, at line 9, the poet switches
direction – both the beloved and nature are threatened mainly by time, and it is only through
this third force (poetry), that they can live on.
It’s also worth picking up on that word "ow’st." That apostrophe might be contracting
"ownest" or "owest," and both work nicely. Either the beloved won’t lose the beauty he/she possesses
("owns"), or won’t have to return the beauty he/she borrowed from nature and now owes back.
These readings both resonate well with line 4, in which the speaker described the summer months as a
"lease," or a temporary ownership that had to be returned.

Lines 11-12
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;
In another bit of personification (so far we’ve had summer and the sun), the speaker
introduces death. Death, the speaker claims, won’t get a chance to claim the beloved in the
valley of the shadow of death (this death’s shadow idea is from Psalm 23:4), since he/she is
immortal.
The general meaning of line 12 (you’re eternal) is actually easier to see if you read the line
as a metaphor. As a metaphor, "lines to time" definitely refers to a poem, since they are
lines set to a meter, or time.
Here, then, the poet is making two bold claims: first, that his poem is "eternal," and second,
that it nourishes and develops "thee," as it is where he/she is able to "grow."
Now this willingness to discuss the fact that he’s writing a poem within the poem itself is
pretty cool stuff.
One fancy way of describing this kind of artistic tactic is called "breaking the fourth wall." That’s a
metaphor itself, and you can think of it as a stage: in a normal play, any indoor action goes on as if the
front edge of the stage were an imaginary wall. The actors, in other words, are supposed to pretend
they’re in a real world with four walls and no audience watching them. If the actors, however, recogniz
that there’s an audience out there, they’re considered to be "breaking" through that fourth wall, as they
try to do away with the artificiality of pretending they’re just living out a normal life up there on stage.
Well that’s exactly what’s starting to go on here. If you were thinking this poem was a love letter to a
beloved, you can forget it. This is a poem written to be read by an audience, and that audience, by
continuing to read the poem, will try to make the beloved grow into a character, and in turn make
him/her immortal.

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Lines 13-14
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
The couplet, in the end, is really just a fuller admission of what the speaker points toward
in line 12. He has completely shattered the fourth wall, and (successfully, we should add)
predicted that this poem will continue to be read, and the beloved will continue to be
analyzed and re-analyzed for all time. In other words, by allowing us to try to give life to
"thee" (figuring out who he/she was), the speaker and the poem itself give "thee" life.
In other words: as long as men live and can read, this poem will continue to live, and so
keep "thee" alive.
But let's examine the language more closely. First of all, we’ve got some more
personification: technically, eyes don’t really "see," and poems certainly don’t "live."
Also, it’s worth noting the incredible arrogance here: why should we believe that as long as humankind
exists, this poem will continue to live? Can’t we imagine a world in which every copy of this poem were
burned, and so "thee" would stop living?
And even if people are still reading the poem, what kind of "life" is it that the beloved will
be leading? This definitely doesn’t sound like heaven. The beloved can’t make any choices
for his or her self, isn’t conscious, and can only be recognized as the poet described him or
her.
In fact, we ought to wonder whether it is "thee" who will be alive, or rather the poet’s (very
limited) representation of "thee."
Plus, remember how in line 9 we noted that summer could also be eternal? Well, the end of this poem
kind of makes you wonder. So why, again, is the beloved eternal but not summer? Just like summer, the
beloved is going to fade away in real life, and just like summer, the beloved has been written about and
preserved in a poem. How come, by the end of the poem, it’s only "thee" who lives on and
not nature? Finally, remember how back in line 1 we were already wondering if "thee"
might not just be the speaker’s lover, but also us readers? Well now the speaker has broken
through the fourth wall, and revealed himself as not just a lover, but also as a writer of
poetry.
So check this out (this should be fun for you math kids out there): the speaker is talking to
"thee," and that speaker is actually the poet. Now who do poets write for? That’s right, for
us readers.
So we have three conditions here: the speaker speaks only to "thee," the writer speaks only
to us, and the speaker and writer are the same thing. Doesn’t that mean, then, that "thee," is
the same as "us"?
Trippy.
Frankly, we think that’s a pretty cool reading. Basically, the speaker here is speaking to all
of mankind. All of us feel this pressure of mortality, but here Shakespeare crystallizes that anxiety in a
poem, so that this idea of mankind will live on forever.
The last lines, then, can be read as circular: "so long as mankind lives, mankind will continue to live."
Cool? Too weird? You decide.
In any case, these last two lines hammer home something we suspected from those very first pronouns:
this speaker seems more interested in himself and his abilities as a poet than the qualities of his
addresses.
A Shakespearean Sonnet in Iambic Pentameter
This is a classic Shakespearean sonnet with fourteen lines in very regular iambic pentameter. With the
exception of a couple relatively strong first syllables (and even these are debatable), there are basically
no deviations from the meter. There aren’t even any lines that flow over into the next line – every
single line is end-stopped. There are two quatrains (groups of four lines), followed by a third quatrain
in which the tone of the poem shifts a bit, which is in turn followed by a rhyming couplet (two lines)
that wraps the poem up. The rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.
Sonnet 18 Themes

Love

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Sonnet 18 opens up looking an awful lot like a traditional love poem, but by the end it’s pretty clear
that the poet is much more into himself and the poetry he produces than the beloved he’s addressing.
In fact, at times it seems like he might actually harbor some resentment toward the beloved. So if it is
a love poem it’s to the poet.
Literature and Writing
Like much of Shakespeare’s work, Sonnet 18 is all about writing and expressing one’s self through
language. This is, at its clearest, a poem about the power o the written word over death, fate, and
possibly even love.
Time
The speaker of Sonnet 18 is absolutely xated on fate and mortality, but believes he’s come up with an
effective time machine: poetry. Instead of contemplating a beautiful summer’s day, this speaker can’t
stop thinking about how everything in life is temporary and eeting. No need to fear, though – the hero-
poet steps in and announces that, by artistically representing his beloved, he can save him or her from
the ravages of time. "Time," then, is the intersection of the "Literature and Writing" theme and the
"Man and the Natural World" theme. Man, in the natural world, can’t avoid being subject to time, but
is through literature, the poet argues, that he can free himself.
Man and the Natural World
On one level, Sonnet 18 is clearly concerned with the relationship between man and the eventual,
inescapable death he’ll encounter in nature. On another leve the poet also seems fascinated by the
relationship between seasonal weather and personal, internal "weather" and balance.

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