Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18

May always makes me think of that line from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.” In honor of this month, here are my reflections on my favorite parts of that poem. (Here’s a quick refresher for those of us who haven’t been in a high school English class in a while: a sonnet is a poem consisting of fourteen lines, with each line written in iambic pentameter. That means each line is ten or eleven syllables with an emphasis landing on every other syllable. The kind of sonnets that Shakespeare wrote follow a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.)

The tonal variance in Shakespeare’s sonnet cycle, of which Sonnet 18 is a part, is erratic. The speaker of the sonnets is sometimes playful, sometimes pensive; at one moment seductive, the next reticent and the next analytical. This variance is on display here in Sonnet 18. The question of the first line can be read as reverent, but it can also be read as flippant, almost whimsical. The speaker may just as much be talking to himself than to the beloved. But either way, the passion or the lightness of the opening query is short-lived, quickly giving way to careful, systematic inquiry which in turn evolves into philosophical speculation.

The second line already prefigures the thematic shift that will be fully enacted in the third quatrain. The first line asks Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? And the speakers answer to his own inquiry is ultimately negative; while the beloved and a summer’s day do in fact share some aesthetic qualities, their differences are of greater importance. In the second line, those qualities of loveliness and temperance common to both the beloved and a summer’s day can only be so compared when they are qualified: the beloved being more lovely and more temperate. The distinctions are portrayed in progressively greater relief throughout the course of the text. In the first quatrain the reader is initially presented with the possibility - if not the plausibility - of comparison in the question of the first line; in the second line the similarities are of quality but not of degree; from the third quatrain onward, the difference is indeed in quality.

The import of the word temperate hinges upon not two but three distinct meanings. A summer’s day is temperate in the most ordinary sense of the word, as being hot, and this meaning is literally applied to the heat of the body of the beloved. The obvious pun also applies, with temperate as a synonym for the word hot, in its colloquial sense as erotic or desirable. Third, to describe a person as temperate is also to attribute the quality of temperance – self-control, moderation – to their character. So, in a single word the speaker of this poem is attributing two desirable but perhaps contradictory characteristics to the beloved, who exhibits both sensual excess and moral restraint in tension.

With the exception of the word darling, every word in the third line is a single syllable. This places particular emphasis on the word darling, commanding the reader’s aural attention to the word and asking us to consider its significance. The word darling itself connotes three separate qualities, each of which is shared by the buds of May and the beloved to whom the poem is addressed. First, darling connotes the high value placed on the beloved. Both the buds of May and the addressee are darling because they are valuable. Second, it underscores the fragility of the beloved. He is so delicate that even a flower in its full maturity would be too sturdy of an analog. And finally, as a diminutive it hints at the familiarity, even intimacy, between the speaker and the addressee. This intimacy may be either real or imagined, consummated or hoped for.

In fact, all but six words in the first four lines are a single syllable each. Those six outliers are all two syllables each: compare, summer’s, lovely, temperate, darling, and (once again) summer’s.

Composing a single metrical line out of a lot of short words can often leave the line feeling rushed or overcrowded. But in this case the musicality of the lines is heightened rather than degraded by the short syllables. This is due to Shakespeare’s alternating truncated vowel sounds with drawn-out vowel sounds; compare the duration of the drawn-out vowel sounds rough, darling, and May with the truncated winds, do, shake, the, buds, and of. While the first syllable of darling and the syllable of May align neatly with the stresses of iambic pentameter, the first syllable of the line is both metrically unstressed and phonetically drawn-out, resulting in a kind of counterpoint. There is also a significant amount of aural resonance, particularly in the second line’s assonance of more, lovely, and (again) more, as well as the repetition of art and temperate. The fourth line is dense with consonance found in summer’s, lease and short alongside too, short, and date.

The pastoral conceit of the summer’s day and all of its associated natural imagery – summer breeze, budding flowers, sunshine – becomes nothing but fodder for the speaker’s purposes. Likewise, the familiar theme of nature’s beauty becomes, in Shakespeare’s rendering, a sentimental platitude to be done away with in favor of a greater human value. This is the apparent renaissance spirit of Sonnet 18. Nature is found wanting in comparison. Ultimately nature’s beauty is compared not with human beauty but with human labor and ingenuity. Both nature and the beloved are lovely and temperate, but human love (and the work associated with it, in this case a work of literature) successfully defies both chance and nature’s course, creating something at once beautiful, lively, and permanent.

Shakespeare’s sonnets are available for checkout at your local Mercer County Library System branch, along with Shakespeare’s plays and an endless supply of other great literature. Maybe you haven’t read a classic in a while, or maybe they are a regular part of your reading life. Either way, maybe it’s time to pay us a visit and finally get around to reading that book you missed from high school English class, or rediscover on old favorite!

- by Neil, Lawrence Branch