Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare
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 owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Summary
The speaker opens the poem with a question addressed to the beloved: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s
day?” The next eleven lines are devoted to such a comparison. In line 2, the speaker stipulates what mainly
differentiates the young man from the summer’s day: he is “more lovely and more temperate.” Summer’s days
tend toward extremes: too dim. And summer is fleeting: its date is too short, and it leads to the withering of
autumn, as “every fair from fair sometime declines.” The final quatrain of the sonnet tells how the beloved
differs from the summer in that respect: his beauty will last forever (“Thy.”) and never die. In the couplet, the
speaker explains how the beloved’s beauty will accomplish this feat, and not perish because it is preserved in
the poem, which will last forever; it will live “as long as men can breathe or eyes can see.”
Cornelia Geraghty Page 1
Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare
Theme -The main themes in the poem are love and beauty.
Symbol- An important symbol would be a summer day. The summer day is filled with extremes just as love is.
Key Facts
This sonnet is certainly the most famous in the sequence of Shakespeare’s sonnets; it may be the most famous
lyric poem in English. Among Shakespeare’s works, only lines such as “To be or not to be” and “Romeo, Romeo,
wherefore art thou Romeo?” are better-known. Sonnet 18, often alternately titled Shall I compare thee to a
summer's day?, is one of the best-known of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William
Shakespeare.. Most scholars now agree that the original subject of the poem, the beloved to whom the poet is
writing, is a male, though the poem is commonly used to describe a woman.
In the sonnet, the speaker compares his beloved to the summer season, and argues that his beloved is
better. He also states that his beloved will live on forever through the words of the poem. Scholars have found
parallels within the poem to Ovid's Tristia and Amores, both of which have love themes. Sonnet 18 is written in
the typical Shakespearean sonnet form, having 14 lines of iambic pentameter ending in a rhymed couplet.
Detailed exegeses have revealed several double meanings within the poem, giving it a greater depth of
interpretation.
Author Information
*Shakespeare lived to 52. It is known that he was born in April 1564 and that he died on 23rd April 1616.
*Shakespeare had seven siblings.
*Shakespeare and Anne Hathawy had three children together – a son, Hamnet, who died in 1596, and two
daughters, Susanna and Judith. His only granddaughter Elizabeth – daughter of Susanna – died childless in 1670.
Shakespeare therefore has no descendants.
*During his life, Shakespeare wrote 37 plays and 154 sonnets.
* Suicide occurs an unlucky thirteen times in Shakespeare’s plays. It occurs in Romeo and Juliet where both
Romeo and Juliet commit suicide, in Julius Caesar where both Cassius and Brutus die by consensual stabbing, as
well as Brutus’ wife Portia.
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Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare
Citations
1) http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/shakespeare-facts/
2) http://gsearch.sparknotes.com/search?q=sonnet+18+by+william+shakespeare&templ
ate=default&output=xml_no_dtd&oe=UTF-8&ie=UTF8&client=default_frontend&proxystylesheet=default_frontend&site=default_collectio
3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare
Cornelia Geraghty Page 3