Sonnet 18: "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day"

Or, How to Influence People and Achieve Immortality through Art

[Photo by Karen Swallow Prior]

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil¹

Welcome, new subscribers! I got quite a few of you last week with my “To Burn or Not to Burn” post, which generated a lot of response and much solidarity. I’m a little stunned but so very grateful. It helps to know that others see and recognize this crisis point (one others have certainly faced long before me).

To be honest, I’m a little worried now that if you are new around here you might feel like I have done a “bait and switch” in returning this week to our regularly scheduled programming: British literature! If I’ve not lost you already, hold up for a minute, and consider giving this turnabout in subject a try!

While I do write from time to time about personal things that reflect larger goings-on, I have been using this space mostly as a classroom (given that I lost my real one last year, which you can read about here). I also post “extras” with writing I’ve done elsewhere and other news. All my content is free, but—based on wise advice I received before starting this newsletter—only paid subscribers can comment. That keeps the trolls out and allows the conversation here to be rich and productive (and it really is—I have great supporters!). If anyone would like to be part of that conversation and can’t afford a paid subscription, shoot me a message (karenswallowprior@gmail.com) and I can offer a gift subscription. (On the other hand, if you are able and led to pay for a subscription, it really, really does help now, since this is one of the ways I’m scrapping together income these days. I’m extremely grateful and honored by every single one of you who support me in this way. Extremely.)

Now, back to the subject at hand. I do try my best to make British literature interesting … I know literature doesn’t seem as pressing, or urgent, or resonant with the real-life crises and betrayals so many of us are going through right now. But the whole point (of literature and art) is that much of what we are going through in this moment is reflective of the universal human condition. It can be comforting and instructive to read the words of those who lived so long ago and connect with them somehow.

More importantly, I think refusing to give up on goodness, truth, and beauty—refusing to surrender our attention entirely to their opposites—is perhaps one of the ways we can begin to right this upside-down world. And simply to feed our souls, regardless of the position of the world.

As David Brooks wrote last week in an excellent essay on the power of art, titled, “How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society,”

I’m convinced that consuming culture furnishes your mind with emotional knowledge and wisdom; it helps you take a richer and more meaningful view of your own experiences; it helps you understand, at least a bit, the depths of what’s going on in the people right around you.

Deep reading, in particular, Brooks points out (as I do also in my book, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books):

… empowers us to see the real people in our lives more accurately and more generously, to better understand their intentions, fears and needs, the hidden kingdom of their unconscious drives. The resulting knowledge is not factual knowledge but emotional knowledge.

So without further ado, let us turn our attention to Shakespeare and his art of the sonnet.

To warm up, let’s re-read his most famous one:

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 dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;

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.

These lines, these rhymes, these images, these similes, these metaphors, these thoughts all stand on their own, certainly. They need no help from me. But perhaps reflection and explanation can serve as a cloth that dusts off the diamond a bit so it might shine even more.

One thing that can bring great clarity to any work of literature or art (or anything, really) is to know what it is: what its form is (or its genre) because form really is ultimately function. If we were to examine an automobile, for example, we’d certainly judge a race car differently from a pickup truck—their different forms are designed to achieve a different function. Poetry is no different. (And now that I think about it, isn’t this the same for church? Isn’t much of what we see that is broken in the church today a result of the church becoming something it is not supposed to be? A business, a power player, a good ol’ boys’ network, a social gathering, a part of the political machine?  A church is a church when it does what the church is supposed to do. And a sonnet is a sonnet when it does what a sonnet is supposed to do.)

So what is a sonnet supposed to do?

“Sonnet” comes from an Italian word meaning “little song,” and that from a Latin word meaning “sound.” So a sonnet is to be that: a little song. There are variations of sonnet forms, but the form developed in English, by Shakespeare, is called … wait for it … an English (or Shakespearean) sonnet. (Don’t worry, things get more complicated as we go along.)

A Shakespearean sonnet consists of 14 lines structured by three quatrains (four-line stanzas) followed by a couplet, written in iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. (You probably remember some of this from high school, right?) In short, a sonnet is one of the most rigid, rule-bound forms of poetry there is. Everything is determined from the number and stresses of syllables, to the rhymes, to the subject. For sonnets always deal with serious, enduring matters, such as love, death, life, art. (So far, not taxes.)

But these rules aren’t arbitrary. They aren’t just rules for rules’ sake. They are rules that conform to the nature of the English language—to its natural sounds and rhythms. The iambic meter (unstressed syllable followed by stressed one) happens to be the meter that conforms most closely to the natural rhythm of the English language. Using this meter helps create poetry that is poetry, yet doesn’t (when done well) sound overly artificial. This is why when reading poetry out loud, you must resist the temptation to read it in a singsong voice. That only detracts from the natural rhythm achieved by the skillful poet’s word choice and arrangement.

Pentameter—the five-foot line (consisting of ten syllables with every other one stressed)—creates longer lines befitting more ponderous subjects. Limericks, nursery rhymes, and greeting card poetry use shorter lines that lend themselves toward more lighthearted or even silly subjects.

Thus, form is content. Form cultivates content.

The sonnet form—with all its rules—cultivates elevated thoughts about serious subjects. And with that couplet upon which the sonnet ends, the sonnet in this form² creates a turn in thought or emphasis that is the basis upon which to understand and interpret the poem in its entirety.

So, how are we to understand Sonnet 18?

When I teach this sonnet, I like to point out all its luscious figures of speech: the apostrophe (the address to an absent person) with which the poem opens, “eye of heaven” as metaphor for the sun, and the personification of the sun and death—to point out just a few.

The memorable first line tends to make us remember this poem as a romantic love poem written in praise of the beloved’s beauty, or to be more precise, her “fairness,” which is truly fair in being “temperate” in contrast to the wild extremes of summer days, which are tossed between rough winds, turning impetuously from hot to cool and back again. No, the beloved’s fairness is in her virtuous moderation. What sweet praise the poet offers this beauty.

And yet, when we arrive at the couplet, something happens. A condition is put on all that preceding praise. All that has been said is true only “so long as …”  So long as what? So long as there are people who live to see this beauty—which, in one sense, is another way of saying beauty is in the eye of the beholder (rather than inhering in the object of beauty)—and “so long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

But what is the “this”? What is it that gives life to the fair one and upon which her eternal beauty depends?

We turn to grammar to answer that question. The “this” to which that demonstrative pronoun points is found two lines above. “This” refers to “eternal lines.” If we sum up the last quatrain of the poem, it basically says to the fair one, “Your beauty will not fade, nor will you lose your fairness, when you grow in this, these eternal lines.”

“This” is “these eternal lines.” “This” is the poem.

In other words, the fairness of this beloved is eternal because it is memorialized in this poem.

This is not a sonnet about romantic love or human beauty. It is a sonnet about the power of art.

***

Up next (we’ll maybe do two or three sonnets at a time): sonnets: 55, 73, 116, 130, and 138.

1. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. By Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 117.

2. We’ll get to at least one other sonnet form later: the Italian sonnet.