Sonnet 18

Sonnet 18

The speaker opens the poem with a question addressed to the beloved: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” The next lines are devoted to such a comparison. In one of the line, the speaker says what mainly differentiates the young man from the summer’s day: he is “lovelier and more temperate.” Summer’s days tend toward extremes: they are shaken by “rough winds”; the sun often shines “too hot,” or too dim. And summer is fleeting: its days are too short, and it leads to the withering of autumn, as “every fair from fair sometime declines.” The final stanza of the sonnet tells how the beloved differs from the summer in that respect: his beauty will last forever and never die. In the couplet, the speaker explains how the beloved’s beauty will accomplish this feat, and not perish because it is preserved in the poem, which will last forever; it will live “as long as men can breathe or eyes can see.”