Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day :- William Shakespeare

Sonnet no. - 18

Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day ?

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was a famous English poet and dramatist of the sixteenth century.  He wrote sonnets, tragedies, comedies and historical plays.  Some of his noted works are Macbeth, Midsummer Night's Dream, Venus and Adonis.  Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets.  Shakespearean sonnet has fourteen lines, ending in a rhymed couplet.  In this poem Shakespear inquires into the theme of the destruction brought by time and the eternal quality of art which transcends the ravages of time.

 

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 dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed;
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.
     So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
     So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Summary of Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day 

Sonnet no . 18 is dedicated to a friend of the poet whom he admires greatly . The friend is a young man of great beauty . To bring out the exquisite beauty of his friend , the poet goes into several comparisons in the first light lines . The poem says that where as the beauty of a summer's day is subject to fluctuation , the beauty of his friend is eternal and unchangeable . The poem affirms that his friend is more beautiful than the changing beauty of nature . It is beauty of the sort whose fairness cannot be entrapped by age or death . The poet immortalises the beauty of his friend in his verse . Whenever the poem will be read , the beauty of his friend would be revived . This points to the timeless nature of art which captures beauty and keeps it safe from , to quote another line from Shakespeare , " the blank hand of time " .