long summary of shall I compare thee to a summers day
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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;
The first four lines of Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18" establish the broad concern of the poem and some of its stylistic features. The first line of the poem poses a rhetorical question: the speaker asks whether he should compare his beloved (addressed directly as "thee") to a summer's day. (Based on contextual clues in the surrounding poems, most scholars assume that the person addressed in this sonnet is a young man, possibly of higher social standing than the poet. Despite extensive analysis, there is no consensus about who this young man was). In posing this question, the speaker is playing on a Renaissance proverb: "as good as one shall see in a summer's day"—which means something like "as good as the best there is." The speaker is asking, in other words, whether it would be appropriate to compare the young man to something widely regarded as the best and most beautiful thing possible.
In the following three lines, the speaker offers a series of reasons why the comparison is inappropriate. His reasons are surprising—the young man is more beautiful than a summer's day. His beauty exceeds a proverbially perfect thing. The speaker offers a series of reasons why. He is more "lovely" and less extreme. In contrast to the heat of a summer's day, he is "temperate": mild and pleasant. The word "temperate" is particularly suggestive since it derives from the Latin word tempus—meaning a "period of time." The echo of the Latin word suggests an emerging concern in the poem with time itself and its effects: aging, decay, and death.
In the following two lines, Shakespeare notes that the summer is itself temporally limited. It emerges from spring and falls into winter. Thus the buds of beautiful flowers are shaken by "Rough winds," which remind one of the winter that has been and the winter to come. The perfection has a short lease: it endures only for a brief moment. This concern with time itself increasingly occupies the poem—and becomes its central challenge as the speaker searches for a metaphor or simile that does not imply that his beloved will decay and die.This sonnet is certainly the most famous in the sequence of Shakespeare’s sonnets; it may be the most famous lyric poem in English. Among Shakespeare’s works, only lines such as “To be or not to be” and “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” are better-known. This is not to say that it is at all the best or most interesting or most beautiful of the sonnets; but the simplicity and loveliness of its praise of the beloved has guaranteed its place.
On the surface, the poem is simply a statement of praise about the beauty of the beloved; summer tends to unpleasant extremes of windiness and heat, but the beloved is always mild and temperate. Summer is incidentally personified as the “eye of heaven” with its “gold complexion”; the imagery throughout is simple and unaffected, with the “darling buds of May” giving way to the “eternal summer”, which the speaker promises the beloved. The language, too, is comparatively unadorned for the sonnets; it is not heavy with alliteration or assonance, and nearly every line is its own self-contained clause—almost every line ends with some punctuation, which effects a pause.
Sonnet 18 is the first poem in the sonnets not to explicitly encourage the young man to have children. The “procreation” sequence of the first 17 sonnets ended with the speaker’s realization that the young man might not need children to preserve his beauty; he could also live, the speaker writes at the end of Sonnet 17, “in my rhyme.” Sonnet 18, then, is the first “rhyme”—the speaker’s first attempt to preserve the young man’s beauty for all time. An important theme of the sonnet (as it is an important theme throughout much of the sequence) is the power of the speaker’s poem to defy time and last forever, carrying the beauty of the beloved down to future generations. The beloved’s “eternal summer” shall not fade precisely because it is embodied in the sonnet: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,” the speaker writes in the couplet, “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”