Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day?
by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
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.
Yes, one of the most cliché of the poetic favorites. I’ve seen this sonnet multiple times, it was one of the first pieces that I analyzed. What works? It’s timeless, formulaic, and meaningful. Shakespeare incorporated figurative language but does so with the romantic tones of the age and not in a forced manner. The poet used his famed ‘Shakespearean Sonnet’ style establishing rhyme and rhythm.
Poetry can’t be deemed successful because it seems cute or it rhymes. Successful poetry will have a pattern or structure that deems it separate from a list of words. Also, because poetry isn’t typically a lengthy choice of writing, the words used must be chosen carefully and should meaningful to the piece as a whole. This means that authors have liberty to omit certain parts of speech; instead of writing in sentences authors can cut the prepositions and attempt to relay just the essence of thought.
Moreover, this poem is effective because it incorporates a common and timeless theme, that of love. The strongest poetry deals with strong themes, one note poems fall a bit short of the attempted impact.
~Nitesh Arora
Shall I compare thee to a mid summer's day? NO! According to Shakespeare, he, the man Shakespeare is referring to, is lovelier and more temperate. Therefore, the comparison is no appropriate.
ReplyDeleteSomething to ponder on:
There have been three explanations as to the "why" of this sonnet. Some believe Shakespeare was simply referring to a friend of his. Since in those days it was sometimes appropriate for men to use the term "love" between friends, they suggest that this same term, as used here, was nothing more than love amongst two male friends.
Others believe that, though the above is true, Shakespeare allusions to subjects, such as a mid summer's day, which even in those days were used more as a lover's comparison, were more romantic in nature. This gave through to a whole new conclusion that Shakespeare must have been gay or at least had some homosexual relations.
The third explanation is that Shakespeare did not write everything that is now attributed to him. Many believe that it was impossible for an impoverished man in his day in age to know as much about so many different things as he wrote about. According to those who uphold this conclusion, Shakespeare must have been fortunate enough to learn to read and collected many writings from many different unknown authors of his time. Perhaps even just love letters he may have found from time to time. Therefore, the possibility fits that a woman may have written this sonnet about her lover and now simply was attributed to Shakespeare.
What is the truth? Perhaps the best answer will be held by the most imaginative of minds.
Craig Fontenot
I think you touched on something good. I read so many short stories, books, watch films, t.v. where everything seems so forced. At times, it becomes obvious that the writer had to "fight" through writing in order to complete the work. It also seems common to find a part of a story that does not completely fit within what has already been provided so that the intended ending makes more sense. I hate the poem, but i agree it does flow and seems natural.
ReplyDeleteD. Ryan
I don't understand why anyone would suggest this poem is directed at a man, particularly since Shakespeare's Sonnets, if memory serves, never specify the gender, nor any other quality of to whom they refer, other than his metaphor. My best guess is that this is due to the line, "And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;" except that this is plainly a reference to the Sun, and the Sun-god Apollo (Shakespeare knew his Greek Mythology and Pantheon).
ReplyDeleteBesides, the point of the stanza is to address the nature of change and set the reader up for what follows... because the point of the poem is that he is actively immortalizing the both the subject and their 'fairness', but placing them into the lines of verse. THAT's the power of the piece and, methinks, the main reason it has remained so popular for so long.