The Bard, verbatim

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Shakespeare’s line begins what has come to be the most famous love sonnet in history, and while the poem is commonly assumed to be about beauty, a close reading reveals a different intention.

Before I get ahead of myself, let’s take a look at the poem itself:

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 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 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.

The subject of the poem is set up in the first line to be compared to a summer’s day, and the following 13 lines follow through with such a comparison. The “beloved,” as she (I’ll stick with “she” simply for clarity of pronouns) will be referred to from here on, is, we learn, actually very little like Shakespeare’s idea of a summer’s day. She is, for one, more lovely and more mild. While summer is prone to gales in its early days and blasting heat while in full force, the beloved is constant in her temperament and appeal. Summer, too, is fickle even at the peak of its radiance, as any cloud or act of nature has the power to hide the sun. Here again the beloved trumps summer: unlike summer’s undependable warmth, the beloved’s “eternal summer shall not fade.” Not even death’s shadow can dim her natural splendor, as in death she will not grope in the dark, but flourish, having been given an eternity to grow.

It would appear, then, that the words that most frequently spring to mind when asked to quote a poem about beauty is rather an ode to consistency (perhaps consistent beauty, but we cannot be sure—even “lovely” does not definitively reference physical beauty). And while such a revelation speaks little to the poem’s fame, it does allow it to take on quite a different meaning than popularly thought when it is actually read and analyzed, thus enhancing both of the frames of thinking about the poem, and love.

photo credit: erin MC hammer