May I Compare Thee to Summer’s Day. - William Shakespeare

May I Compare Thee to Summer’s Day. - William Shakespeare

Sonnet XVIII (18) – William Shakespeare

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 dimmed;

And every fair from fair sometimes declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed.

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

William Shakespeare was a celebrated poet, dramatist and an artist of Elizabethan Age. A literary acumen and consummate artist. Every ward was so carefully chosen for both reference to sense and sound, so as so his diction became not only melodious and musical but also touching the deepest depths of philosophical insights of human nature.

Sonnet – 18, is a sublime example for his perfect craftsmanship of writing in his own style, comparing the ‘Patronage’ of an unidentified patron at his crucial times of poverty to the ‘Summer’s Day’. According to him the unidentified person’s presence may be equivalent to the joy of summer, which is the happiest season of Europe. Whatever is ‘more lovely’ or beautiful is liable to be ‘more temperate’ Rough winds of the Nature do disfigure the most beautiful the ‘darling bud of May’ (rose). Even ‘summer’s lease’ may be ‘too short a date’ wherein the ‘eye of heaven’ (sun) be faded away. Whatever is ‘fair’ (beautiful) that comes from the ‘fair’ (nature) may have very short span of life. ‘Chance’ (fate) and the ‘nature’s changing course’ (time) are always working against to their (fairies of Nature) and disfigure the Nature’s beautiful things.

Let all elements of Nature are subjected to fall as victims to the snares of ‘fate’ and ‘time’ but the ‘patronage’ of the dark person is eternal and immortal. The poet is here immortalizing the patronage of the dark patron without fading away in the due course of time. So the poet is proudly saying that the ‘patronage’ of the dark person may be remembered forever so long as his poems survive. He brags ‘so long as men can breathe or eyes can see so long lives this (poem) so long as give life to thee’.

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