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Poetry Sunday: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Searching for a poem on the theme of summer, I found the Bard himself. 

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (Sonnet 18)

William Shakespeare, 1564 - 1616

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.
*~*~*~*
Now, where I live "summer's lease" is decidedly not too short. In fact, our "summers" are sometimes six months long and quite often "too hot the eye of heaven shines." But Shakespeare surely had it right in extolling the summer of our lives. Our wish is that our "eternal summer shall not fade" but linger far into our old age. That our lives will be as pleasant as a perfect summer day.
Well, we can hope.
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Comments

  1. CarmenJuly 19, 2015 at 1:13 PM

    His writing is so complex...I spend more time thinking about the meaning of words than appreciating his metaphors, but I am a non-native English speaker.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dorothy BordersJuly 19, 2015 at 5:24 PM

      Even for those of us native English speakers, the writing is complex and always bears thinking about.

      Delete

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