Sonnet 18 Summary

Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? is about establishing the power of the written word over time. The speaker asserts the superiority of Fair Youth over a summer’s day. A summer’s day is beautiful and temperate but it is momentary. 

He goes on to find the drawbacks of summer’s day. The sun is too hot and sometimes its glow fades. Like the sun, everything in nature fades gradually.

Unlike them, the beauty of the persona shall not diminish. The speaker asserts in the third quatrain that his youthful beauty will keep glowing in his verse.

This will be possible until men stop stopping reading the sonnet and imagining the beauty of Fair Youth. 

Sonnet 18 Analysis

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.

The first quatrain of the sonnet starts with a question. The question is if the speaker asks if he compares the addressee of the sonnet to a beautiful summer’s day. We presume “thee” in the first line of the sonnet is referred to Fair Youth since Shakespeare dedicated his sonnet sequence 1-126 to a young man; Fair Youth. 

A summer’s day is bright and beautiful. The sun shines brightly and casts its warm glow everywhere. Flowers bloom everywhere and the gentle breeze fills the fragrance of the air with a sweet and heavenly aroma. Moreover, the soothing melody of the chirping birds adds to the beauty of the moment. The azure sky with its moving fluffy, cotton-like clouds makes it a sight to see. It is a pleasing and congenial day where everything becomes alive and harmonious making it a heaven on earth. 

The speaker states that the Fair Youth is far lovelier and more temperate than the summer. His friend, Fair Youth is a young, fair, handsome, kind man whom the speaker admires. We can gather an idea of his beauty from the lines of other sonnets. 

For instance, in “Sonnet 20: A woman’s face with nature’s hand painted”, the speaker expresses his admiration for the beauty of the Fair Youth as “the master-mistress of my passion,” who has both feminine and masculine qualities. 

He is so beautiful that nature has itself has painted his face with her hand. Because of these possessions of extraordinary traits, makes him more beautiful than any woman. 

However, the speaker admires the young man not just for his physical beauty but also for his innate nature. The speaker, in “Sonnet 53: What is your substance, whereof are you made”, states the essence of man’s beauty and grace is his constant heart. 

It is the same Fair Youth for whom the speaker in “Sonnet 30” feels blessed for having him in his life. 

Though the summer is pleasing rough winds sometimes destroy the delicate buds of May and the beauty of summer is ephemeral. The placement of contradictory words rough and darling in the same line “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May” conveys the paradox of nature. 

On one hand, “darling” suggests tenderness, fragility, or beauty that exists in nature whereas “rough” implies harshness, violence, or destructive forces of nature. 

If there is creation there must be destruction. Creation and demise are parts of the cycle of nature. The fourth line of the first quatrain reinforces the same statement which highlights the fleeting nature of the things in nature. 

The statement on the fleeting summer is contradictory to the final statement on the longevity of the young man in the third quatrain of the sonnet which we will discuss below. 

The summer stands for the inevitability of change and the young man stands for eternal beauty. By referring to the contrast between them, the speaker introduces the theme of the poem: the superiority of the written word over the transience of nature.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,     

And often is his gold complexion dimmed;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;

The second quatrain suggests the transitory of beautiful things. The “eye of heaven” refers to the sun, which is an integral part of summer. The speaker represents the sun as a divine entity. 

The sun is an integral part of summer as it plays a vital role in sustaining life on earth and makes the season like summer possible. However, it can be too intense and uncomfortable to look at in summer and make the summer sometimes unbearable. 

One thing we keep in mind, Shakespeare belongs to England where the average temperature during the summer range from around 15°C to 20°C (59°F to 68°F). Therefore, a non-native English reader might not understand why the speaker is calling summer days temperate. This idea will help us to understand the poem in a better way.

Moreover, his golden-colored radiance for which the summer becomes heavenly most of the time diminishes. The summer, which is the epitome of beauty, gradually decays by itself. It again reinstates the same idea, the fleeting beauty of nature, which we have discussed in the first quatrain. 

The speaker personifies the sun.

Not just the sun, every beautiful thing in nature is subject to die and decay, either by accident or the natural process of decaying. The word “untrimmed” in “By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed” implies the loss of vigor.

These beautiful things not just include the objects of nature but also human beings. The speaker is aware of the fleeting nature of man’s life. We have observed the same concern for the transitory world in Edmund Spenser’s poem “Sonnet 75: One Day I Wrote Her Name”. 

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.

As the speaker declares the short span of all beautiful things, therefore, he presents a solution of immortalizing his subject in the third quatrain. 

The way speaker in Edmund Spenser’s poem “Sonnet 75: One Day I Wrote Her Name” claims to make his beloved immortal, similarly, the speaker in “Sonnet 18” will make the young man immortal by writing a poem on him.

By doing this, he states that his eternal summer shall not fade. He will not lose the vigor of his youthful age that he has now and none can take it away from him. This is not even possible for death as well as he cannot brag about showing his power over him. 

The speaker again personifies death as a being and personifies death in a poem is a quite common literary device. It helps the readers to comprehend an abstract and complex concept like death. 

Despite being powerful, Death will remain powerless while his beauty will keep radiating through the lines of the verse. 

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The beauty of the Fair Youth will endure the passage of time and surpasses each beautiful thing in nature till man continues living and keeps reading the verse. 

The use of anaphora “So long” in the thirteenth and fourteenth lines of the sonnet emphasizes the endurance of the young man’s beauty till the distant point of the future. 

The discussion of the Fair Youth will keep the man alive and his beauty will always remain untarnished even after many generations.  

The irony of the sonnet is three is no description of the young man but the description of a summer’s day. Though the speaker intents to immortalize the man more than the Fair Youth, is lasting beauty described in the poem will be more read by the readers to come. 

However, here we can quote John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in this context:

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter”

In the entire fourteenth line, the speaker does not elaborate on any physical description of the man except in the second line of the sonnet. Therefore, we are forced to imagine a beautiful young man who is more younger and handsome than the sensory organs could perceive. 

The unseen beauty of the young man will keep allowing the imagination of the readers to an idealized version of the man in their mind that will be appreciated by the generations to come. 

This makes the sonnet appealing and eternal. By not describing his beauty, he intends to express his admiration for the Fair Youth and share his relationship with the man with the readers. 

The power of poetry lies not in the ability to describe the physical details of its subject, but rather in evoking the essence of an experience or emotion in the readers’ mind. 

Shakespeare successfully captures the speaker’s emotion concerning the young man.

Sonnet 18 Structure

Like Sonnet 116, it is a part of the Fair Youth sequence. Therefore, the poem follows the same rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. It has three quatrains and one couplet. Each quatrain contains four lines and the couplet has two lines, making it fourteen lines.

Shakespeare has composed this in iambic pentameter, which means each line contains ten syllables with a rhythmic pattern of unstressed syllables followed by stressed syllables. This contributes to the musical quality of the poem.