Shakespeare: 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 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.

Commentary

The poem is definitely using metaphors.The stability of love and its power is the theme. Shakespeare starts to praise his friend, but he slowly builds the image of his friend into that of a "perfect" person.His friend is differentiate to summer (weird right?), but at the start of the third quatrain, he is summer. He has metamorphosed into the standard by which true beauty can and should be judged. Shakespeare only answer to such beauty is to ensure that his friend will forever be in human memory. He achieves this through his verse, believing that as history writes itself, his friend will become one with time. The final couplet ( this confirms that this is a sonnet) reaffirms Shakespeare's hope that as long as there is breath in mankind, his poetry too will live on.

This poem is best known and most well-loved of all one hundred and fifty-four sonnets. Shakespeare is basically expressing his friend to a summer's day. He also expresses hoe strong his friend is by saying that the friend is immortal; he says that the friend will  never die. Shakespeare also expresses how young the friend seems to look to him. He says "nor will you lose the beauty that you posses;" basically saying that he friend will stay beautiful and will never become ugly in his eyes.