Read the timeless masterpiece by William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18, on Artinfo.ge. We continue our journey through classic English literature, celebrating the poem that promised to make beauty immortal through the power of words.
Sonnet 18
By William Shakespeare
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 Sonnet 18 Means
Sonnet 18 opens with a question the speaker immediately answers for himself: no comparison to a summer’s day will really do, because summer is flawed. Its winds are rough, its warmth doesn’t last, and even its best days are, in the speaker’s words, subject to chance and to “nature’s changing course.” The person being addressed is better than summer precisely because summer fades and this person, in the world of the poem, will not.
The turn arrives in line 9, marked by “But.” Where the first eight lines catalogue summer’s shortcomings, the second half makes a bold claim: the beloved’s “eternal summer” will not fade, because it no longer depends on the seasons at all — it depends on the poem. Shakespeare isn’t promising eternal youth. He’s making a more specific and, for a poet, more self-interested claim: as long as this sonnet is read aloud or read silently by someone, somewhere, the subject of it stays alive on the page.
The Final Couplet
The last two lines are among the most quoted in English poetry:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
“This” refers to the poem itself. It’s a striking move — the sonnet stops being about the beloved’s beauty and becomes, in its final breath, about its own power to preserve that beauty. Shakespeare returns to this idea across several of his sonnets: that verse can outlast bronze, stone, and the people it describes.
Form and Structure
Sonnet 18 follows the Shakespearean (or English) sonnet form: fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, arranged in three quatrains and a closing couplet, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The structure itself does some of the poem’s work — three quatrains build the comparison and complicate it, and the couplet lands the argument in two tight, rhymed lines.
Who Was Sonnet 18 Written For?
Sonnet 18 is part of a sequence of 154 sonnets Shakespeare wrote, most of which were first published in 1609. The first 126 sonnets, including this one, are addressed to an unnamed young man usually referred to by scholars as the “Fair Youth.” The identity of this figure has never been confirmed, and Shakespeare never names him in the poems. What the poem does confirm is its own claim: nearly 400 years later, people are still reading it — which is, in a way, proof of the argument it makes.
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