The Clog from OzSonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?
September 29th 2006 02:11
Sonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?
"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 oft' 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 wanderest 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.":
This is one of Shakespeare’s beautiful sonnets (number 18 of 154). He believes that the (lady, presumably) he is speaking of is more lovely and more temperate than a summer’s day. He tells of summer’s rough winds and its short stay, the strong sun or overcast weather. Shakespeare declares that his love’s ‘eternal summer shall not fade’ because his poem makes love immortal: “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” Shakespeare has such lovely poetry. He manages to describe everything so beautifully..!
Did You Know?:
Homoerotic suggestions in a number of his works have led commentators to believe that Shakespeare may have been bisexual. Twenty-six of his Sonnets are love poems addressed to a married woman (the "Dark Lady"), but one hundred and twenty-six are addressed to a young man (known as the "Fair Lord").
C.S. Lewis wrote that the sonnets are "too lover-like for ordinary male friendship" and that he "found no real parallel to such language between friends in the sixteenth-century literature." But others interpret them as referring to intense friendship rather than sexual love.
hakespeare.jpg" target="_blank">Image part of the Public Domain
"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 oft' 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 wanderest in his shade,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.":
This is one of Shakespeare’s beautiful sonnets (number 18 of 154). He believes that the (lady, presumably) he is speaking of is more lovely and more temperate than a summer’s day. He tells of summer’s rough winds and its short stay, the strong sun or overcast weather. Shakespeare declares that his love’s ‘eternal summer shall not fade’ because his poem makes love immortal: “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” Shakespeare has such lovely poetry. He manages to describe everything so beautifully..!
Did You Know?:
Homoerotic suggestions in a number of his works have led commentators to believe that Shakespeare may have been bisexual. Twenty-six of his Sonnets are love poems addressed to a married woman (the "Dark Lady"), but one hundred and twenty-six are addressed to a young man (known as the "Fair Lord").
C.S. Lewis wrote that the sonnets are "too lover-like for ordinary male friendship" and that he "found no real parallel to such language between friends in the sixteenth-century literature." But others interpret them as referring to intense friendship rather than sexual love.
hakespeare.jpg" target="_blank">Image part of the Public Domain
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