 SONNET 18 |
PARAPHRASE |
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Shall
I compare thee to a summer's day?
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Shall I compare you to a summer's
day?
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Thou
art more lovely and more temperate:
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You are more lovely and more
constant:
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Rough
winds do shake the darling buds of May,
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Rough winds shake the beloved buds
of May
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And
summer's lease hath all too short a date:
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And summer is far too short:
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Sometime
too hot the eye of heaven shines,
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At times the sun is too hot,
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And
often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
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Or often goes behind the clouds;
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And
every fair from fair sometime declines,
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And everything beautiful sometime
will lose its beauty,
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By
chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
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By misfortune or by nature's
planned out course.
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But
thy eternal summer shall not fade
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But your youth shall not fade,
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Nor
lose possession of that fair thou owest;
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Nor will you lose the beauty that
you possess;
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Nor
shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
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Nor will death claim you for his
own,
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When
in eternal lines to time thou growest:
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Because in my eternal verse you
will live forever.
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So
long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
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So long as there are people on
this earth,
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So
long lives this and this gives life to thee.
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So long will this poem live on,
making you immortal.
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ANALYSIS
temperate (1): i.e.,
evenly-tempered; not overcome by passion.
the eye of heaven (5): i.e., the sun.
every fair from fair sometime
declines (7): i.e., the beauty (fair) of
everything beautiful (fair) will fade (declines).
Compare to Sonnet 116: "rosy lips and cheeks/Within his bending sickle's
compass come."
nature's changing course (8): i.e., the natural changes age brings.
that fair thou ow'st (10): i.e., that beauty you possess.
in eternal lines...growest (12): The poet is using a grafting metaphor in this line.
Grafting is a technique used to join parts from two plants with cords so that
they grow as one. Thus the beloved becomes immortal, grafted to time with the
poet's cords (his "eternal lines"). For commentary on whether this
sonnet is really "one long exercise in self-glorification", please
see below.
Sonnet 18 is the best known and
most well-loved of all 154 sonnets. It is also one of the most
straightforward in language and intent. The stability of love and its power
to immortalize the poetry and the subject of that poetry is the theme.
The poet starts the praise of his
dear friend without ostentation, but he slowly builds the image of his friend
into that of a perfect being. His friend is first compared to summer in the
octave, but, at the start of the third quatrain (9), he is summer, and thus,
he has metamorphosed into the standard by which true beauty can and should be
judged.
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1. Shall I compare thee to a summer's
day?
This is taken usually to mean 'What if I were to compare
thee etc?' The stock comparisons of the loved one to all the beauteous things
in nature hover in the background throughout. One also remembers Wordsworth's
lines:
We'll talk of sunshine and of song,
And summer days when we were young,
Sweet childish days which were as long
As twenty days are now.
Such reminiscences are indeed anachronistic, but with the recurrence of
words such as 'summer', 'days', 'song', 'sweet', it is not difficult to see
the permeating influence of the Sonnets on Wordsworth's verse.
2. Thou art more lovely and more
temperate:
The youth's beauty is more perfect than the beauty of a
summer day. more temperate - more gentle, more restrained, whereas the
summer's day might have violent excesses in store, such as are about to be
described.
3. Rough winds do shake the
darling buds of May,
May was a summer month in Shakespeare's time, because the
calendar in use lagged behind the true sidereal calendar by at least a
fortnight.
darling buds of May - the beautiful, much loved buds of the early
summer; favourite flowers.
4. And summer's lease hath all too
short a date:
Legal
terminology. The summer holds a lease on part of the year, but the lease is
too short, and has an early termination (date).
5. Sometime too hot the eye of
heaven shines,
Sometime
= on occasion, sometimes;
the eye of heaven = the sun.
6. And often is his gold
complexion dimmed,
his gold complexion
= his (the sun's) golden face. It would be dimmed by clouds and on overcast
days generally.
7. And every fair from fair
sometime declines,
All beautiful things (every fair) occasionally
become inferior in comparison with their essential previous state of beauty (from
fair). They all decline from perfection.
8. By chance, or nature's changing
course untrimmed:
By chance accidents, or by the fluctuating tides of
nature, which are not subject to control, nature's changing course
untrimmed.
untrimmed - this can refer to the ballast (trimming) on a ship which
keeps it stable; or to a lack of ornament and decoration. The greater
difficulty however is to decide which noun this adjectival participle should
modify. Does it refer to nature, or chance, or every fair in the line above,
or to the effect of nature's changing course? KDJ adds a comma after course,
which probably has the effect of directing the word towards all possible
antecedents. She points out that nature's changing course could refer
to women's monthly courses, or menstruation, in which case every fair
in the previous line would refer to every fair woman, with the implication
that the youth is free of this cyclical curse, and is therefore more perfect.
9. But thy eternal summer shall
not fade,
Referring forwards to the eternity promised by the ever
living poet in the next few lines, through his verse.
10. Nor lose possession of that
fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall it (your eternal summer) lose its hold on that
beauty which you so richly possess. ow'st = ownest, possess.
By metonymy we understand 'nor shall you lose any of your beauty'.
11. Nor shall death brag thou
wander'st in his shade,
Several half echoes here. The biblical ones are probably 'Oh
death where is thy sting? Or grave thy victory?' implying that death
normally boasts of his conquests over life. And Psalms 23.3.: 'Yea though
I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil ' In
classical literature the shades flitted helplessly in the underworld like
gibbering ghosts. Shakespeare would have been familiar with this through
Virgil's account of Aeneas' descent into the underworld in Aeneid Bk. VI.
12. When in eternal lines to time
thou grow'st,
in eternal lines
= in the undying lines of my verse. Perhaps with a reference to progeny, and
lines of descent, but it seems that the procreation theme has already been
abandoned.
to time thou grow'st - you keep pace with time, you grow as time
grows.
13. So long as men can breathe, or
eyes can see,
For as long as humans live and breathe upon the earth, for
as long as there are seeing eyes on the eart.
14. So long lives this, and this
gives life to thee.
That
is how long these verses will live, celebrating you, and continually renewing
your life. But one is left with a slight residual feeling that perhaps the
youth's beauty will last no longer than a summer's day, despite the poet's
proud boast.
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Summary
The speaker opens the poem with a
question addressed to the beloved: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
The next eleven lines are devoted to such a comparison. In line 2, the
speaker stipulates what mainly differentiates the young man from the summer’s
day: he is “more lovely and more temperate.” Summer’s days tend toward
extremes: they are shaken by “rough winds”; in them, the sun (“the eye of
heaven”) often shines “too hot,” or too dim. And summer is fleeting: its date
is too short, and it leads to the withering of autumn, as “every fair from
fair sometime declines.” The final quatrain of the sonnet tells how the
beloved differs from the summer in that respect: his beauty will last forever
(“Thy eternal summer shall not fade...”) and never die. In the couplet, the
speaker explains how the beloved’s beauty will accomplish this feat, and not
perish because it is preserved in the poem, which will last forever; it will
live “as long as men can breathe or eyes can see.”
Commentary
This sonnet is certainly the most famous in the sequence of Shakespeare’s
sonnets; it may be the most famous lyric poem in English. Among Shakespeare’s
works, only lines such as “To be or not to be” and “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore
art thou Romeo?” are better-known. This is not to say that it is at all the
best or most interesting or most beautiful of the sonnets; but the simplicity
and loveliness of its praise of the beloved has guaranteed its place.
On the surface, the poem is simply a statement of praise about the beauty
of the beloved; summer tends to unpleasant extremes of windiness and heat,
but the beloved is always mild and temperate. Summer is incidentally
personified as the “eye of heaven” with its “gold complexion”; the imagery
throughout is simple and unaffected, with the “darling buds of May” giving
way to the “eternal summer”, which the speaker promises the beloved. The
language, too, is comparatively unadorned for the sonnets; it is not heavy
with alliteration or assonance, and nearly every line is its own self-contained
clause—almost every line ends with some punctuation, which effects a pause.
Sonnet 18 is the first poem in the sonnets
not to explicitly encourage the young man to have children. The “procreation”
sequence of the first 17 sonnets ended with the
speaker’s realization that the young man might not need children to
preserve his beauty; he could also live, the speaker writes at the end of
Sonnet 17, “in my rhyme.” Sonnet 18, then, is the first “rhyme”—the speaker’s first
attempt to preserve the young man’s beauty for all time. An important theme
of the sonnet (as it is an important theme throughout much of the sequence)
is the power of the speaker’s poem to defy time and last forever, carrying
the beauty of the beloved down to future generations. The beloved’s “eternal
summer” shall not fade precisely because it is embodied in the sonnet: “So
long as men can breathe or eyes can see,” the speaker writes in the couplet,
“So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
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::Analysis::
Shakespeare’s eighteenth sonnet is, perhaps, one of the
best-known sonnets contained in the English literary canon.
It is a conventional
Shakespearean sonnet that explores conventional themes in an original way.
With characteristic skill Shakespeare uses the sonnet to exalt
poetry and his beloved.
The first quatrain
introduces the primary conceit of the sonnet, the comparison of the speaker’s
beloved to a summer’s day.
In the first line the speaker introduces the comparison of his
beloved to a summer’s day.
The speaker then builds on this comparison when he writes,
“Thou art more lovely and more temperate” (2) because he is
describing his beloved in a way that could also describe summer.
When he describes “rough winds [that] do shake the darling
buds of May,”
(3) he is using rough winds as a metaphor for capricious
chance and change,
and he implies that his beloved does not suffer from these
winds as summer does.
The first quatrain, therefore, introduces a comparison that is
expanded upon by the remaining two quatrains.
The second quatrain
strengthens the comparison of the beloved to a summer’s day.
The speaker anthropomorphizes the sky, or “heaven,” (5) by
using the metaphor of an “eye”
(5) for the sun so that the comparison between a person and a
season becomes vivid.
By assigning heaven an “eye,” the speaker invokes the image of
his beloved’s eyes.
Similarly, in the next line when the speaker mentions that
summer’s “gold complexion” is often “dimmed,” (
6) he is attempting to compare another human attribute of his
beloved with some trait of summer.
The second quatrain presents summer as possessing only mutable
beauty.
The third quatrain no
longer focuses on the mutability of summer, but it speaks of the nearly
eternal nature of the memory of the beloved.
When the speaker assures his beloved that her “eternal summer
shall not fade,”
(9) he is using summer
as a metaphor for her beauty.
Using the word “fade” facilitates the comparison of the
abstract notion of a summer’s day to the concrete person of the beloved
because fading is a quality of light.
Similarly, when the speaker writes of the beloved entering the
“shade” (10) of death, he is expanding on the use of the metaphor and
reinforcing the poem’s primary conceit.
When the speaker boasts
that his beloved will not suffer the same fate as a summer’s day because he
has committed her to “eternal lines,” (12) he adds the theme of poetry itself
to a sonnet that had previously been a love poem.
Shakespeare gives his beloved immortality through poetry that
God did not give to a summer’s day.
The couplet concludes
the sonnet by tying together the themes of love and poetry.
In it the speaker starkly contrasts the life spans of his poem
and his beloved’s memory to the fleeting nature of a summer’s day.
He boasts that, unlike a summer’s day, his poetry and the
memory of his beloved will last “so long as men can breathe or eyes can see”
(13).
This last comparison provides a stark contrast to the time
period, “a summer’s day,” (1) introduced at the beginning and exalts poetry
along with the beloved.
Shakespeare used a
conventional form of poetry to praise poetry and his beloved.
He boasted that both would be preserved nearly eternally. Five
hundred years later, no one refutes his boast.
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هذه هى القصيدة رقم
18 الشهيرة التى يبدأ
فيها شكسبير بعقد مقارنة بين جمال محبوبته واعتدال الجو فىيوم من أيام الصيفالأنجليزى ثم ينكر هذه المقارنة لأن الصيف فصل متقلب وينتهى الىان محبوبته تكسر حدود الزمن لأن الشاعر قد خلدها فى قصيدته التى لابد أن يكتب لها الخلود فى رأيه وأن ينشدها الناس على مر الزمان.ولتلك القصيدة ترجمتانالترجمة الأولى ألا تشبهين صفاء المصيف بل أنت أحلى وأصفى سماء ففى الصيف تعصف ريح الذبول وتعبث فى برعمات الربيع ولا يلبث الصيف حتى يزول وفى الصيف تسطع عين السماء ويحتدم القيظ مثل الأتون وفى الصيف يحجب عنا السحاب ضيا السما وجمال ذكاء وما من جميل يظل جميلا فشيمة كل البرايا الفناء ولكن صيفك ذا لن يغيب ولن تفتقدى فيه نور الجمال ولن يتباهى الفناء الرهيب بأنك تمشين بين الظلال اذا صغت منك قصيد الأبد فمادام فى الأرض ناس تعيش ومادام فيها عيون ترى فسوف يردد شعرى الزمان وفيه تعيشين بين الورى والترجمة الثانية لفطينه النائب- من كتاب فن الترجمة- للدكتور صفاء خلوصى- 1986 من ذا يقارن حسنك المغرى بصيف قد تجلى وفنون سحرك قد بدت فى ناظرى أسمى وأغلىتجنى الرياح العاتيات على البراعم وهى جذلى والصيف يمضى مسرعا اذ عقده المحدود ولى كم أشرقت عين السماء بحرها تلتهب ولكم خبا فى وجهها الذهبى نور يغرب لابد للحسن البهى عن الجميل سيذهب فالدهر تغير واطوار الطبيعة قلب لكن صيفك سرمدى ما اعتراه ذبول لن يفقد الحسن الذى ملكت فيه بخيل والموت لن يزهو بظلك فى حماه يجول ستعاصرين الدهر فى شعرى وفيه أقول: ما دامت الأنفاس تصعد والعيون تحدق سيظل شعرى خالداً وعليك عمراً يغدق |
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