SHALL I COMPARE THEE

« 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 dimmed, And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow rest.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,So long lives this and this gives life to thee.»

«Shall I compare thee» is the SONNET XVIII of William Shakespeare collection.

This sonnet was for a man, but Shakespeare didn’t write his name, he called him «fair youth».

The sonnet was divided into three quatrains and a final couplet

THE RHYME SCHEME

« Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? A Thou art more lovely and more temperate. B Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, A And summer's lease hath all too short a date: B

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, C And often is his gold complexion dimmed, D And every fair from fair sometime declines, C By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed; D But thy eternal summer shall not fade, E Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; F Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade, E When in eternal lines to time thou grow rest. F

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, GSo long lives this and this gives life to thee.» G

THE FIRST QUATRAIN

« 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:

In the first line we can find a rhetorical question that creates an immediate emotional involvement

In the second line we find a comparison between the beloved and a summer day. At the end he says that the lover is more lovely and more temperate

We find opposition between words belonging to the semantic field of summer and words that relate to the decline

THE SECOND QUATRAIN

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed, And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed;

This is a metaphor , it is the sun

We have a reference with the Elizabethan age

In the verse 7 we have a reflection on the destructive power of time

THE THIRD QUARTAIN

But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow rest.

In the verses 10-11-12 he says that thanks to the poem, the beauty of the beloved will be preserved forever

THE FINAL COUPLET

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

Long emphasize the duration of the time

In the verse 14 we find a «chiasmo». This verse summarises the sense of all poetry