The key to understanding Sonnet 18, perhaps the most famous of Shakespeare's sonnets.
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TRANSCRIPT
Let's take a look at that first line, shall we? "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?" Now, like a lot of poems, what this is doing is setting up a comparison, an opposition. The person who is being spoken to, "thee", that is, "you" is being compared to a summer's day. And then, if we look at the second line... "Thou art more lovely and more temperate". So in this comparison the summer's day comes off worse.
So let's go on and take a look at the next few lines of the poem. "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 his gold complexion is dimm'd; and everyfair from fair sometime declines, by chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd."
So here, logically, we would expect the poet to be developing one side or other of the comparison. And pretty clearly he's developing the summer's day. He's talking about what's wrong with a summer's day, basically. And when we get this kind of list of items... we don't need to understand everything in the list. As long as we understand something on the list we're probably going to get the general idea. So if we understand "rough winds", that "summers lease" is "too short", that the "eye of heaven", which of course is the sun, is "too hot", "sometimes too hot", if we understand just one or two of these things we are going to get a general sense of what the gist of those lines is going to be.
So the rough winds "shake the darling buds of May", "Summer's lease hath all too short a date", it's too hot sometimes, "the eye of heaven shines too hot ... and often is his gold complexion dimm'd". Can you guess what that means? Well, it just means it's cloudy. "And every fair from fair sometime declines". Every beautiful thing, from being beautiful, at some stage will decline, it will go down. So basically that's what's wrong with a summer's day.
Now let's look at the next part of the poem; let's look at the final lines. "But thy eternal summer shall not fade, nor lose possession of the fair thou ow'st; Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest 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."
Well, clearly now, the poet has shifted his focus onto the person that he's addressing in the poem. Unlike a summer's day your beauty shall not fade, but we're left with a problem here; why on earth not? Why would the beauty of the person addressed in the poem not fade? Why should death never brag that "thou wand'rest in his shade"? Why is it that death will never be able to boast, "I've got you"? Why will that person be exempt from death? And another mystery; what are these "eternal lines"?
If we can guess what the "eternal lines" are we've probably got the key to the entire poem. And he basically develops the idea of the eternal lines, saying, "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see" then in the last line, "So long lives this", and what is "this"? This is what "gives life to thee" so if we can understand what "this" is then we've probably got an understanding of what Shakespeare is saying here. Can you guess it? Have you got some idea? I'll give you a minute to think about it. I'm going to tell you! I'm going to tell you! So if you don't want to know you'd better pause the video!
Okay? "So long lives this". "So long as men can breathe", which they can, so long as "eyes can see", which they do, "So long lives this"; so long lives this poem, so long live the eternal lines of poetry. In the end, the poem is not so much a comparison of the person that he's talking about, that is more lovely than a summer's day, and the natural beauty of summer. It's more art, poetry, against the world of nature. In art, in poetry, things can live forever. Shakespeare wasn't modest, was he? He had the idea that people would be reading his poem "So long as men can breathe and eyes can see"; they'll be reading this poem, and you, the person he's writing the poem to will live forever and be perfect in this poem. Okay, have you got the basic idea of what's going on here?
Well, there you are, then. That's it!
