Sonnet 18
by William Shakespeare
Original Version ‘Modernised’ Version
a b a b c d c d e f e f g g | 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. | Shall I compare you to a summer’s day? You are more lovely and more modest . Strong winds shake the precious little May buds, and the summer is too short. Sometimes the sun shines too hot And his gold complexion grows faint; And sometimes all beauty becomes less beautiful either by chance or the unchanged course of nature; but your eternal summer will not fade away nor lose that beauty you owe; nor shall death boast that you walk in his shadow when you grow in eternal verses to time; as long as men can breathe or eyes can see, this will live and this gives you life. |
A sonnet is defined by the number of lines it contains – 14. In the English language these lines conform to what we call the ‘iambic pentameter’, the standard line of English verse, which is defined by the distribution of stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, if we take the first line of the sonnet above we see that the natural stresses in pronunciation (if we exaggerate a little) fall like this:
shall I comPARE thee TO a SUMmer’s DAY
You might argue with my distribution of stress in this line and when scanning poetry it is often better to start with the second line of the poem because poets often break the rules in the first line to attract attention to it, so let's have a look at:
Thou ART more LOVEly AND more TEMPerATE
What is happening here is that the line is being divided into five ‘feet’ consisting of two syllables each, an unstressed one followed by a stressed one, thus:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Thou ART| more LOVE| ly AND| more TEMP | erATE
This ‘foot’ is known as the iambic foot (there are other different kinds of feet, but for now we shall just look at this one, the form of which is easy to remember because the phrase i AMB | ic FOOT consists of two iambic feet). As there are five of these in the standard line of English poetry, the line is known as the ‘iambic pentameter’. Just as a point of interest, the phrase ‘blank verse’ means poetry written in non-rhyming iambic pentameters, whereas ‘free verse’ means poetry written in no recognised formal distribution of sounds. Most of the poetry in Shakespeare’s plays is blank verse.
The other aspect that defines the sonnet is its rhyme scheme. If we look at the first four lines above, we see that the first and second, and third and fourth lines rhyme, so we label this distribution as ‘abab’. The next four lines also rhyme, but with different sounds, so we call this group ‘cdcd’. If we look at the poem as a whole, we see that the rhyme scheme is the following:
abab cdcd efef gg
The four-line groups are called ‘quatrains’ and the two-line group is the ‘couplet’. In passing, it's interesting to note how formal poetry has a mathematical element, just as music has; we have specific numbers of syllables in line, specific numbers of lines that rhyme in a set order, specific numbers of lines in a verse (or stanza) and in the case of the sonnet, a specific number of lines in the poem as a whole.
The point about the 14-line sonnet is that this number can be formulated in various ways, e.g.:
abab cdcd efe ghg
Finally, the sonnet usually contains two linked themes. The change in theme usually happens around the 9th line, although in this poem it happens in l.10. Let's see how it happens:
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
In the first part of the poem Shakespeare has been telling his loved one how her beauty is more permanent than that of the summer and the general tone is light, airy and cheerful; then the mood changes and refers to death and ‘his shade’.
We find that in discussing the technical aspects of the sonnet we are now talking of its meaning, so let's go back to the beginning and start an interpretation of the theme of the work. At the end of the 1960s I remember seeing a film made by or for the British Council about the role of nature in Shakespeare's works. The theme of this film has stayed with me ever since because it reminds us that until the Industrial Revolution ordinary people had a three-part relationship with nature that most of us have lost. The first part is based on the fact that almost all the objects they had contact with were organic; they deatl mainly with wood and leather and with clay in the form of pottery. Metal was expensive to obtain and relatively few domestic or professional objects were made of it. (In passing, this makes us realise how phenomenally wealthy the armour-wearing gentry and nobility were.)
The second aspect of the relationship with nature is the intimate knowledge people had of the names of plants and natural phenomena. If you or I walked out into the countryside today, how many plants or trees could we identify by name? Shakespeare and his contemporaries not only knew the names of plants but also knew what nutritional or medicinal properties they had. In addition, these people were in intimate contact with both wild and domesticated animals, the former for hunting and the latter for farm work and/or eating. Again, how many of us have killed, plucked and gutted chickens for our table? I'm told that there are children today who believe that roast chicken starts its life on the supermarket shelf.
The third aspect of the relationship with nature concerns time. Shakespeare and his contemporaries would not have easy access to clocks or calendars. They measured time of day by the sun and the months of the year either by the seasons or by religious festivals. We find frequent references in literature to temporal concepts such as: "We shall be gone before Michaelmas" and as late as 1820 we find John Keats writing his long poem The Eve of Saint Agnes (the day before the Festival of Saint Agnes). My mother was born on a hill farm in Wales at the beginning of the 20th century and long after she had moved away from the farm she still had a parallel sense of ‘agricultural time’ and I remember her commenting as we looked out of the window on train journeys (in those days ordinary people could still afford to travel on British trains): "Hmmm, they’re late getting the hay in here".
The vitally important aspect of the human relationship with nature in the pre-Newtonian world is that, although rational-thinking people accepted the Copernican universe in which the Earth and the planets revolve around the sun, there was a ‘poetic’ way of thinking that still gave value to the Platonic view of the universe as one in which the sun and planets were fixed in transparent, concentric spheres that circulated around the earth. Proof of the validity of this kind of philosophical ‘doublethink’ can be seen in the fact that even today the most serious newspapers carry daily or weekly horoscopes alongside news reports of the latest discoveries of the Hubble telescope. And it's a reasonably safe bet that more people read the former than the latter.
No matter which astronomical system Shakespeare is following in this poem, no one can doubt that the sun is an element of maximum value in the lives of human beings, so much so that various civilisations have worshipped it. Therefore, if Shakespeare is saying that his loved one is more beautiful than the earthly elements nourished by the sun, she gains extra value from the comparison.
The great problem with beauty, of course, is time. As soon as the human being achieves a state of beauty that state begins to decline with the onset of wrinkles, unwanted weight, lack of hair where it is needed and excess of it where not needed, and various appendages becoming victims to the laws of gravity. And this is where Shakespeare is able to defy the natural processes by saying that even the sun's rule over summer comes to an end, but the summer of the loved one is eternal because she has been enshrined in his poem.
I suspect that, had Britain had Ayatollahs or the Inquisition at this time, Shakespeare could well have been hauled up on a charge of heresy because what he is doing here is saying that he, a mere mortal, is capable of endowing immortality upon another mortal whereas this is something that only God can do. I feel this shows, as most of Shakespeare's plays show, the opening of the modern age. Although Renaissance man does not deny the existence of God, he does question many of the traditional Church's official lines concerning God. Shakespeare's great characters like Hamlet and Macbeth bestride the narrow Earth and hurl their questions at the Deity. In Germany, where the Reformation began, Dr Faustus makes his pact with the devil in quite a rational way while even in ultra-Catholic Spain, Don Juan defies Christian rules knowing that he will go to Hell.
In other words Shakespeare is showing us here the authentic arrogance possessed by the great artist who is aware of his own power - and history has proved him right. You and I are reading this poem today and there is no reason to doubt that it will be preserved somewhere and read once again after the generation that believes Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and computer games are the height of culture has sunk into oblivion.
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