Sonnet 18 claims that the beloved is more beautiful than a summer’s day, and that unlike summer, this beauty will never fade, because the poem itself will keep it alive as long as people read.
Sonnet 18: Full Poem
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 wander’st 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.
Text from the 1609 Quarto, with spelling and punctuation lightly modernized.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about Sonnet 18 for quick reference.
What Sonnet 18 Means
Sonnet 18 starts by comparing the beloved to summer and ends by claiming the poem will keep the beloved alive forever.
The first quatrain asks whether the speaker should compare the beloved to a summer’s day, and answers that the beloved is lovelier and more even-tempered. Summer has faults: rough winds shake the tender buds of May, and summer’s time is short, like a lease that runs out too soon.
The second quatrain adds more faults. Sometimes the sun, the “eye of heaven,” shines too hot, and often its golden face is hidden by clouds. Every beautiful thing eventually loses its beauty, stripped of it either by accident or by nature’s normal course of change.
The third quatrain turns with “But.” The beloved’s own summer will never fade, and the beloved will never lose the beauty they own. Death will never be able to boast that the beloved wanders in its shadow, because the beloved will grow into the future inside these eternal lines of verse.
The couplet explains how. As long as people are alive to breathe and see, this poem will live, and the poem will give life to the beloved.
Sonnet 18 Line by Line
Each line, with the sense of it in plain English.
Themes
Sonnet 18 moves through three ideas: the flaws of nature, the beloved’s exemption from them, and the poem as the reason for that exemption.
Nature’s Imperfection
The first eight lines are a list of summer’s shortcomings. It is too windy, too short, too hot, too often cloudy, and like everything beautiful, it fades. The point is not really about weather. Nature’s whole way of working is change, so nothing in nature can serve as a lasting standard for beauty. The comparison the poem proposes in line 1 fails because summer is not good enough.
Beauty That Does Not Fade
The third quatrain promises the beloved three things summer does not have: a summer that will not fade, beauty that will not be lost, and freedom from death’s boasting. Each promise answers one of summer’s flaws. Where summer’s time is short, the beloved’s summer is “eternal.” Where every fair thing declines, the beloved keeps “that fair thou ow’st.”
Poetry as Immortality
The reason for the beloved’s permanence is the poem. “When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st” places the beloved inside the verse, and the couplet makes the verse’s survival depend only on readers: “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see.” The idea is an old one in poetry, going back to classical poets such as Horace and Ovid, but Sonnet 18 states it with unusual simplicity. In the sonnets just before it, the speaker had urged the young man to have children; here the poem alone is enough.
Form and Language
Sonnet 18 is one of the most regular sonnets Shakespeare wrote, and its plain structure makes its few key words carry a great deal.
Meter and Rhyme
The poem is a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic pentameter, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Its structure follows the argument: two quatrains of summer’s faults, a turn at line 9, a quatrain of the beloved’s permanence, and a couplet that names the cause. The couplet’s two lines begin with the same words, “So long,” so the grammar itself pairs the reader’s life with the poem’s.
The Language of Ownership
Line 4 uses a legal term: summer has only a “lease,” and the lease has “too short a date,” an expiry date. Line 10 answers it with ownership: the beloved will not lose “that fair thou ow’st,” the beauty you own. Summer rents its beauty for a season. The beloved holds it outright.
“The Eye of Heaven”
The sun is personified as an eye and given a “gold complexion,” a face. The image makes summer’s central feature into a person with moods, sometimes too fierce, often clouded over. It also sets up a quiet contrast: summer’s face changes from day to day, while the beloved’s does not.
“Eternal Lines”
“Lines” most obviously means lines of verse. It can also suggest lines of descent, the family lines that the Procreation Sonnets hoped the young man would continue. “To time thou grow’st” uses the language of gardening: the beloved grows into time, grafted onto it, the image the speaker had used in Sonnet 15 when he promised, “I engraft you new.”
“This”
The final line uses “this” twice, and both times it means the poem. “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” The word points at the page in the reader’s hands, so the promise is kept at the moment it is read.
A Closer Reading
Sonnet 18 rejects the comparison with summer, then gives the beloved a summer anyway, repaired of the two faults it found.
The poem’s answer to its opening question seems to be no: the beloved is more lovely than summer, and summer is flawed. But in line 9 the metaphor comes straight back. “Thy eternal summer shall not fade.” The speaker has not abandoned the comparison. He has kept summer and corrected it.
The corrections are exact. The first quatrain’s complaint was about time: “summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” The repair is the word “eternal.” The second quatrain’s complaint was about loss: “every fair from fair sometime declines.” The repair is ownership: the beloved will not “lose possession of that fair thou ow’st.” A summer with no expiry date and a beauty held outright rather than rented are the two things nature could not supply.
Then the poem shows where this repaired summer is kept. “Eternal” appears only twice in the sonnet, in line 9’s “eternal summer” and in line 12’s “eternal lines.” The repetition ties them together. The beloved’s eternal summer exists in the eternal lines; it is not a season in the world but a season in the poem. What summer could not do, verse does, by holding the beloved’s summer in a form that does not change as the seasons change.
This also explains why the poem never describes the beloved. There are no eyes, no hair, no voice. The only qualities named are comparative, “more lovely and more temperate.” Every concrete image in the poem belongs to summer. The beloved is defined entirely by being what summer is not: steady where it changes, lasting where it ends. What the poem preserves, in the end, is less a portrait of a person than a summer that will not end.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Sonnet 18, answered briefly.
Is Sonnet 18 About a Man or a Woman?
The poem itself never says; it addresses “thee” and uses no pronoun for the beloved. But it is part of the Fair Youth sonnets, Sonnets 1 to 126, which are addressed to a young man, so most readers take it as written to him.
What Does “Summer’s Lease Hath All Too Short a Date” Mean?
Summer lasts far too briefly. A “lease” is a rental agreement, and its “date” is the day it runs out. Summer only rents its season, and the term is short.
Why Does a Summer Poem Mention May?
England used the Julian calendar in Shakespeare’s time, which ran about ten days behind the calendar used today. May therefore fell later in the season and could count as early summer.
What Does “Eternal Lines” Mean?
The lines of this poem, which the speaker claims will last forever. As long as the poem survives, the beloved lives on inside it.
What Does “This” Refer to in the Last Line?
The poem itself. “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” means the sonnet will survive as long as people read it, and it will keep the beloved alive.
Related Sonnets
Three sonnets show how the speaker’s confidence in verse was reached, and how far it went.