Sonnet 18: “Thy eternal summer shall not fade…”

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 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 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.

“Sonnet 18 brings the most dramatic change we have seen. For seventeen sonnets we have had the same theme, ‘get a child to perpetuate your beauty,’ with varying arguments…Sonnet 18 abandons the procreation theme completely, proclaiming W.’s verse to be the key to immortality. We also saw the gradual shift from concerns about the general (the world, Nature, others) to the personal (me, I)—a more caring tone. The tone of Sonnet 18 is passionately personal. This—at last—sounds like a love poem… 

“I get the sense of a longer lapse between Sonnet 17 and Sonnet 18 than between any of the previous sonnets. Something very different is going on. A lot must have happened. There has been a discussion, perhaps. We don’t know what, though. An understanding? (‘OK, I really wasn’t serious about the procreation idea, I just care about you, let me just tell you how I feel.’) A request? (‘Could you please just forget about the child thing? It’s not going to happen. But I really like your sonnets. Could you write some more?’) A declaration? (‘Let’s stop kidding ourselves, we love each other, we enjoy each other’s company, let’s celebrate that.’) We can’t tell what caused the change, only that something has changed…

“One of the beauties of Sonnet 18 is how fluidly it can be applied to love of any sort (well, almost—we’ll get to that much later). For the modern reader, what is hardest to imagine is any two lovers reading this sonnet and finding it does not apply to them. It is just an expression of love.

“But more than love, Sonnet 18 expresses a change in the relationship between W. and Y.M. No longer is W. a supplicant, asking him to change his mind, to do the world a favor—to do him a favor. W. is now an adoring fan. He admires Y.M. and will immortalize him in verse as a favor to him. The roles have changed.”

—Shakespeare’s Sonnets Among His Private Friends, p.51-52 (publication date 10/1/21)