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.
The infamous lines...it's hard not to like the simple romance of the first few lines, no matter what he is actually comparing and contrasting. Reading through it this time, my mind catches more on the downward contrast of Nature's way...as if the subject of this poem were elevated above it- instead of a true crossed comparison as equals, as a shared beauty, or borrowed beauty. The use of pronoun "he" in line 6 is funny to me. I always associate Earthly Nature with Mother Nature, the feminine, (in yoga- Shakti)...while the Sun being the masculine force of forward growth and movement (Sun god!)...I am not sure if he is referring to Nature as a masculine god, or if he, too separates the heavens above from the Earthly realm.
ReplyDeletePatience with these sonnets is key!!