John Green Reads Poetry

So okay, let’s move on to sonnet 18. Now if you’ve seen Shakespeare in love, you know that Shakespeare wrote this for Gwyneth Paltrow. Nope, he didn’t. In “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” the thee in question is that mysterious young man. Basically sonnet 18 is one big extended metaphor, but the hook is that it’s a metaphor that the poet admits isn’t especially successful. Yes, the poet could compare his beloved to a summer’s day, but it turns out that this comparison isn’t really apt. Like the beloved, is nicer than a summer’s day, the beloved has better weather. Really? Better weather? Well, I guess this was England, so yeah, let’s just go with it. And there’s always something lousy about summer days they’re too hot, or they’re windy, or if they’re perfect they’re over too quickly. But that’s not going to be the case with the beloved. Because just like in sonnet 55 the poet is going to immortalize the beloved in this very poem. Thereby he will make the young man perfect eternally. Like a summer day might end, but the beauty of the beloved is going to go on forever “so long as men can breathe or eyes can see.” And this wasn’t, like, Shakespeare being arrogant, this was a pretty common trope in Elizabethan verse, this idea that human life was temporary but that poetry is forever.

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: