William Shakespeare's Sonnet 18

Sonnet 18 is one of Shakespeare's most famous sonnets. It is, as almost all sonnets, a love poem. The sonnet is spoken by a person, presumably male and maybe even Shakespeare himself, who describes the beauty of someone else. It is not stated in this sonnet who this person is, but if you look at all of Shakespeare's sonnets as a whole, it is probably a young male, and I will refer to this person as thus in this text. In the first line of the sonnet,

“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”,

The speaker challenges himself to compare the young male with a day in the summer. He proceeds to do just this the next 11 lines of the poem, and it ends with a couplet explaining how this poem will make the beauty of this young male last as long as humanity. The beauty and simplicity of this poem is probably what makes it so popular.

This sonnet is very simple compared to most of Shakespeare's other sonnets. It is like most of the others written in iambic pentameter, as the regular English sonnet is, and it uses the traditional rhyme scheme of the English sonnets: abab, cdcd, efef, gg. However, the language itself is not as complex as it is in some of his other sonnets. Some of the sonnets are full of alliteration and assonance. There are, however, examples of this in this sonnet too, for instance line 7 which is about how everything that is beautiful will lose some of its beauty over time:

“And every fair from fair sometimes declines”

One can also notice how every line in the sonnet ends with some sort of punctuation, which in a way gives each line its own meaning. Compared to plain English of today, this is a complex poem, but compared to Shakespeare's other sonnets it uses simple language.

I believe that Shakespeare wants this poem to show how beauty can be eternal. In the literary period this was written, the Renaissance, love, death and the passing of time were common themes. One can find them all in this sonnet. The speaker explains why the young male is so lovely and that he will not follow in Death's shadow, but rather live on due to this sonnet. It ends with this couplet:

“So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

What this couplet is saying is that the beauty of this person will last as long as long as humanity, because people will read this (meaning this sonnet). In a way he was right. We are still talking about this sonnet and the person described in it. The beauty of the sonnet displays the beauty of the person it is referring to, and there is no reason to believe that it will be forgotten anytime soon. In that way, the beauty of the person is eternal.

Shakespeare also wanted to show love in this poem. Sonnets are mostly about love, and this one is no exception. The speaker shows his love by comparing this young person to a day in the summer. However, unlike most such comparisons, the speaker does more than say that the young male is as beautiful as a day in the summer, but he goes even further than that.

“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”

In these lines (3-6), the speaker explains how a summer day is in no way perfect. It can be too windy, it can end too fast, it can be too warm and the sun can be dimmed. He goes on saying that the young male does not suffer any such faults:

“But thy eternal summer shall not fade”

This poem shows how beautiful the speaker thinks that the young male is, and while in that case it doesn't have to mean love in a sexual way, it certainly can be applied to it.

I'm male and it is thus socially unacceptable for me to like love poems or sonnets, but if that ever were to change, I know I would love this one. While I do not mind a more complex language where you nearly have to decode the text to get to the true meaning, the simplicity of this one is a breath of fresh and minty air. Combined with the love and beauty portrayed in the poem, it is hard not to like it. I think Shakespeare managed to do exactly what he wanted to do with this sonnet: make it simple, make it beautiful and make it work on more levels than one. And most importantly, he made it eternal.