Alright friends, buckle up and settle in, because today we’re talking about one of the most famous sonnets in history, you all know it, it’s SONNET 18!!!!! You may or may not know it by it’s numerical title, I guarantee that if you heard the first line, and the sometimes title of it, you could rattle off the rest like nobody’s business. It’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

Yeah, that one. But it’s so much more than you’d think!
Before we get into the actual sonnet, let me give you some background info on Shakespeare’s life. (I’m a big proponent of biographical criticism.)

In the most optimistic and hopeful interpretation of his marriage, young William Shakespeare fell in love with a woman named Anne Hathaway, or possibly just had sex with her and then wed her out of duty. They were married when Shakespeare was just 18 and Anne was 26 – and pregnant. That child was born 6 months after the wedding, and would grow up to be Susanna, who would live a long and happy life. Two years later, Anne bore twins, Hamnet and Judith. Judith too would live to old age, though her life was much more tragic than Susanna’s. Hamnet, however, died at the age of 11, and while the cause of his death is unknown, it is likely that he was a victim of the plague. So, obviously Hamnet sounds a lot like Hamlet, and there’s an argument that his death factored in to the writing of Shakespeare’s best play (in my opinion at least) but I believe that his son was also the subject of the famed Sonnet 18. There have been a million and one reading of these 14 lines; some people say it was about the same female love interest that some of his sonnets are about, some say that it’s a young man that still others are about, but there hasn’t been much of a case for it being directed to Hamnet. Without more ado, here’s the text.

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 dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d;
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.
-courtesy of www.shakespeare-online.com-

(I didn’t have a copy on hand to show you my annotations, sorry! I knew I should have brought my anthology to school.)

Let’s get into it!

“Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, | And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:”
-In literature, the seasons often correspond to the stages of man’s life, so summer being adolescence/youth. If summer’s lease hath all too short a date, then the youth of the addressee is cut short. It’s also worth noting that it’s May, and not one of the later months of summer, so the subject was probably in the early stages of youth. Like say, 11.
“Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,”
-The eye of heaven here is literally the sun, but more figuratively can be read as God being too close to the subject, and taking him away.
“And often is his gold complexion dimmed;”
-the gold complexion is that of the sun, and the dimming sun symbolizes the darkness that follows the loss of the subject.
“And every fair from fair sometime declines, / By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;”
-Everything that is beautiful and good will eventually decline, either randomly or because that’s what was always meant to happen.
And here’s where it gets really good-
“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;”
-I really love this, “thy eternal summer shall not fade” is just so beautifully written, and the meaning of this bit oh! This is of course where the author denies Death his prize and immortalizes the subject forever in his words, by the very act of writing him into a poem. Because, while yes, “every fair from fair sometime declines,” it doesn’t have to be that way. By writing the youth and life of the subject into the poem, Shakespeare forever keeps him as that fair and youthful being.
Perhaps the most famous lines of the poem now, to close out the sonnet,
“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
-Oh it’s just so beautiful!!! He’s basically just saying that again here, that this poem will be what immortalizes the subject, and forever there will be a part of him alive in these 14 lines, forever and to the end of time.

While, yes this might be a bit self-aggrandizing, what with Shakespeare expecting that his poetry will live on so long as men can breathe or eyes can see, but in my humble opinion, I believe it to be more about the subject. Even if Shakespeare hadn’t been enormously successful and even if he hadn’t come to be regarded as the best author in the English language of all time, the words he wrote would still have existed. They still would have been written, even if they were forgotten about they would have existed somewhere in time and space. Now, there’s no definite way to say that this text is certainly about Hamnet, I believe that he is talking about his son. To me, the poem is about a young person taken away before their time, and who better to describe this than his son. Critics of this theory will say that because Shakespeare wasn’t a great dad, and wasn’t really present in his kids’ lives that the poem probably wasn’t about Hamnet, but I believe that to be all the more motivation. He wasn’t able to be there for his son in leading up to his death, which must have caused him considerable emotional stress. The best way for him to make that up to Hamnet would be to immortalize him in verse, because it was all that Shakespeare at that point could do.