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SonnetRenaissance · 16093 min · 4 passagesGentle

Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?

William Shakespeare →

The most quoted love poem in English is also an argument. Shakespeare spends eight lines explaining why summer is a bad comparison, then six making a much bigger promise.

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Quatrain 1
Rejected metaphor

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;

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Plain English

Should I compare you to a summer's day? You are lovelier and steadier. Rough winds shake the tender buds of May, and summer's lease runs out far too quickly.

Quatrain 2
Personification

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; And every from sometime declines, By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;

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Plain English

Sometimes the sun is too hot, and often its golden face is hidden by cloud. Everything beautiful loses its beauty eventually — by accident, or simply because nature keeps changing and nothing stays trimmed and perfect.

Quatrain 3
Personification

But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that thou ow'st; Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:

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Plain English

But your summer will never fade, and you will never lose the beauty you own. Death will not get to boast that you are walking in its shadow, because in these eternal lines you grow alongside time itself.

Couplet
Volta

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

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Plain English

As long as people can breathe and eyes can see, this poem will live — and as long as this poem lives, so do you.

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The Globe · Shakespeare & Renaissance drama

Soliloquy, ambition, and the sound of a voice thinking. Every answer comes with the reason and the line that proves it.

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That's the whole thing.

Read it again slowly — it gets better the second time.

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