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 owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest;
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
William Shakepeare
(1564 - 1616)
10 de febrero de 2009
SONNET 18 "Shall I compare thee to a summer´s day?" (Shakespeare)
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Wilkie Collins
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I´ve been promising sometime to publish one of Shakespeare´s sonnets on the blog and here it is, possibly the most famous on love. Some of you already know it, I know, you are very cultivated!
A wonderful sonnet it is perfect.
Difficult indeed is this sonnet for me. However it is interesting to realize how the structure of the verse is alterated in order to make it suitable for the rhyme and rythm.
From what I have a undestood I guess that the idea of the everlasting love should be symbolized with the eternal summer, far from the real one, which is destined to fade and die.
This sonnet is really beautiful. I´ve read it several times and I think I´ve picked the meaning up. Shakespeare is saying that his beloved woman is better than the summer. The word "temperate" is the "key". Summer is so imperfect in its suddenness that doesn´t catch woman´s temperate aptitude up, as if having it gives the virtue of eternity. The opposite of summer, she shall never fade, nor decline, nor dim...
well done María It is about the everlasting beauty that his beloved has and has inspired this poem thus she´ll never fade because she is immirtal in the verses. Very quickly said!!!!
Thank you, Maria and Carmen, but for your help I’ve never got the meaning of the sonnet. I’m not good at poetry, I’ve never been. Te only book about poetry I’ve read in my life have been “Las 1000 Mejores Poesias de la Lengua Castellana” That book I used to love as a child and knew it by heart, but I never went further away. I suppose I lost my sensitivity of poetry. Only one bit of information to you Maria, the sonnet is not addressed to a woman but to a man….
I’m going to read the sonnet several times, and then I’ll tell you my opinion on the subject.
As you know I’ve read lately a book about Shakespeare; there is a great deal of information about the sonnets in it, some, in my opinion, quite interesting. I quote here two paragraphs, I hope you like them:
“In some critics’ view the sonnets are the very summit of Shakespeare’s achievement. “No poet has ever found more linguistic forms by which to replicate human responses than Shakespeare in the sonnets” wrote the Harvard professor Helen Vender in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. “The greater sonnets achieve an effortless combination of imaginative reach with high technical invention…a quintessence of grace”.
Certainly they contain some of his most celebrated lines, as in the opening quatrain to Sonnet 18 (He copy the first quatrain)
What is unusual about these lines, and many others of an even more direct and candid nature is that the person they praise is not a Woman but a man. The extraordinary fact is that Shakespeare, creator of the tenderest and most moving scenes of heterosexual affection in play after play, became with the sonnets English literary history’s sublimest gay poet”.
What I’ve loved the most in the sonnet are the final lines, the power that Shakespeare gives to the written word.
Death cannot destroy the beloved because he is forever alive in the poem, as it is also the speaker’s love towards him.
Carmen says very often that what is written in papers lasts forever (for good or ill) and advises us not to write anything. It seems Master Shakespeare used to think the same thing: What lives in writing lives “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see/So long lives this” because “this gives life to thee”.
As I am not in any paper, I’d have liked to be some “famous” poet’s muse. I put the word famous into inverted commas because I have inspired some poems, but I’m afraid they are only known by me and the writer, I’ll never be immortal!!!
Comparing her beloved with summer, Shakespeare portraits such a season as a time when we enjoy in nearly every way because of the weather. However, it is also a time rather unstable and which does not last forever, thus, we are forced to bear both its moodiness and ephemera.
Nevertheless, love makes the woman unaltered and immortal and despite the fact that we are doomed to get old and to die some day, “love alters not with time’s brief ours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom”.
Magnificent!
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