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SCMP Reporter

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 sometime 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 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.

What is a sonnet?

A sonnet is a particular poetic form. It is most closely associated with the Italian poet Petrarch, and it came to England in the 15th century. It always follows a similar structure:

The poem is always 14 lines long

The metre is iambic pentameter

The rhyme follows a clear pattern. In a Shakespearian sonnet, this pattern is abab/cdcd/efef/gg. You can see that this splits into a pattern of three groups of four lines (each called a quatrain) and a final pair of rhyming lines called a couplet.

What is iambic pentameter?

English verse is based on classical models. An iamb is a unit of one unstressed and one stressed syllable. 'Pent' comes from the Greek word meaning five. So there are five of these units in each line: weak strong weak strong weak strong weak strong weak strong. 'Metre' is just the word for the underlying pattern of rhythm for the line. It is helping to compare this with the time signature that sets the underlying rhythmic pattern for a piece of music.

Just as in music, the actual sound of the lines varies slightly from the underlying pattern, and this is called the rhythm of the line. Mark each syllable to show whether it is unstressed or stressed. Try reading the lines aloud, and you will soon learn to hear the rhythm.

Working out the meaning

You can use the structure to help you to work out the meaning of the lines. Just as paragraphs help us to follow the meaning of a piece of prose, so it helps to read the poem a quatrain at a time.

The poem is a love poem describing the beauty of the poet's mistress. He asks if he should compare her to a summer's day in order to capture her beauty, and then goes on to state the similarities and differences between the beauty of summer and the beauty of her.

The first quatrain says that she is 'more lovely and more temperate', meaning that she is better because she does not have the extremes of temperature of summer. He gives as an example of those extremes the winds that can knock buds off trees when we are least expecting them. Moreover, summer does not last very long, so we can enjoy its pleasures for only a short time. This theme of beauty only lasting a short time is important in this poem.

The second quatrain

These themes are further developed in the next four lines. The sun does not always shine, its 'gold complexion' is dimmed, another example of the extremes of summer weather.

He goes on to say that the beauty of nature never lasts long. It is an inevitable fact of nature that good weather does not last and that flowers die: 'from fair sometime declines'. The word 'untrimmed' means stripped of its beauty, and this happens all the time in nature either because of accidents or because that is what happens in the inevitable course of nature.

The third quatrain

Now there is a change. The first two quatrains make an octet, a group of eight lines. We move into the final group of six lines, the sestet. There is often a change of thought between the octet and sestet.

Unlike the beauty of summer, the beauty of his lover will not fade or die. She will not even die, and death will not be able to 'brag' (boast) that she has become part of his possession.

How can this be true? Surely everyone dies eventually?

Not this lady, because Shakespeare has captured her beauty in the imagery of this poem. The 'eternal lines' are lines of poetry. Yes, she will die, but as long as there are men alive who have the eyes to read, they can recreate her beauty by reading this poem and so give life to her. What greater compliment could a man pay to his lover?

Shakespeare's Sonnets (Advanced Level)



Sonnet describes a  summer's day