William Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day": Analysis (2)

Written by Jordan Dickie - BestWord poetical works and analysis.

    The seventh line of “Shall I Compare thee to a Summer’s Day?” marks a shift in William Shakespeare’s theme, of comparing the sonnet’s subject to a far less adequate summer’s day, towards the underlying and arguably main premise of the fading of youth’s beauty, the natural course of decay, and death being usurped by literature and poetry.  Shakespeare’s seventh and eight lines, “And every fair from fair sometime declines, / By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed;” (7-8), describes how “fairness” or beauty fades away by chance happenings or mortality’s helplessness against the ravages of time.  Shakespeare’s “Summer’s Day” as well as all beautiful, youthful things in nature eventually succumb to age and death.  Shakespeare’s subject, too, is victim to these forces and much like the summer’s day, they too will grow old and die.

     William Shakespeare’s ninth and tenth lines, however, for the sake of his subject, attacks the conventional laws of nature and death: “But thy eternal summer shall not fade, / Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;” (9-10).  Shakespeare declares that his subject will not loose their “eternal summer” (9), or lose the fairness that they possess or owe to nature. Shakespeare goes on to proclaim “Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade, /
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:” (11-12), promising that his subject no longer walks under the shade-like gaze of death, and that they now walk eternally on earth as an immortal being, growing perpetually throughout time.

     William Shakespeare’s sonnet “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day” concludes with the fateful couplet, “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” (13-14); essentially stating that so long as men live and have the eyes to read Shakespeare’s sonnet, men will know of his subjects beauty and this poem will be the key to their immortality.  In literature, Shakespeare decrees, we defeat death and our natural mortality to become metaphysical creatures of the written word; our memories living on throughout time to exist deathlessly in a state of literary grace. 

     It is in this assertion that William Shakespeare finds perhaps the greatest virtue in his sonnet “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”.  While, indeed, it is a love sonnet, meant to either proclaim affections for the subject or win favor with its words, Shakespeare’s sonnet, “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day”, is also a great work of literary philosophy.  Shakespeare appears to believe that immortality is found in the writings of scribes, artists, and poets who document their subjects, in whatever medium they so work, to have their art survive throughout the ages and be incorporated through generation after generation of readerships to far outlive their creators indefinitely, or perhaps even infinitely.  Through words, Shakespeare would agree, death is defeated and immortality is discovered.

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