Shakespeare's Sonnets

Among the most famous of Shakespeare's sonnets is the eldest sonnet in the second section of his cycle, Sonnet 18 which begins, "Shall I comparison thee to a summer's day?" The metaphor Shakespeare invokes, of course, blatantly stated in line one, is the similarity of youth and lulu (of the little man addressed in the first violate of the cycle) to a summer's day. This metaphor is elaborated and sustained throughout the sonnet in solid Metaphysical (or "proto-Metaphysical") fashion.

The first quatrain is devoted to establishing the comparison between youth and looker and summer:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more winsome and more temperate:

Rough winds do put forward the near buds of May,

And Summer's lease hath all similarly short a date

Although Shakespeare begins by indulging in a bit of hyperbole, saying his young subject is "more lovely and more temperate" than a summer's day, he establishes that there are, nonetheless, genuine similarities.

Like summer, youth and beauty are fragile and subject to the ravages of the elements ("Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May") and temporary ("And summer's lease hath all too short a date").

The second quatrain concerns the fluctuating, everyday (rather than ideal), character of summer--and, therefore, by extension, of beauty:

Sometime too hot the warmness of heaven shines

And often is his gold complexion dimmed;

Then the conceit of this inconstant stay

In sequent toil all forwards do contend

moreover do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong

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