100 Best-Loved Poems: Shakespeare's Sonnet XVIII

William Shakespeare
SONNET XVIII

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 owest;
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest,
     So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
     So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Like Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd," Shakespeare's eighteenth sonnet almost defies analysis by virtue of its sheer simplicity. Of all the Sonnets that use the eternizing conceit, this may be the most straightforward (as well as the most influential, I would guess, on Elizabeth Barrett Browning). Its referential essence can be paraphrased in very few words: You're even nicer than a summer's day, and unlike summer, you won't fade away, because I've immortalized you in this poem.

I could remark on is its particular variation on the standard structural breakdown of the English sonnet form (three quatrains and a couplet). The movement of the poem's argument conforms to the 4-4-4-2 movement of the template as follows:

1st quatrain: Initial pattern established, in which the metaphorical vehicle ("summer") is shown to be wanting in comparison to the tenor ("thou"), and the theme of mutability (change, entropy, decay) is broached in the fourth line ("And summer's length hath all too short a date").

2nd quatrain: Pattern continued, with treatment of mutability topos expanded to two lines ("And every fair from fair sometime declines, / By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd").

3rd quatrain: Pattern of comparison concluded, with further expansion of mutability theme to three lines ("fade," "lose possession," "Death," etc.), and addition of eternizing conceit ("eternal lines"). Not only has a third line been added to the mutability strain, but the lines have moved up the quatrain spatially, so that its last line (line 12) is now devoted entirely to the introduction of the eternizing conceit.

Couplet: Eternizing conceit expanded and concluded.

The effect of this gradual interweaving and expansion and contraction is to make the first twelve lines function in effect as one long stanza rather than as three discrete quatrains.

Am I trying too hard here? Maybe. You find something interesting to say about this poem. I mean, beyond the indisputable fact that it's a gorgeous piece of verbal music.

Speaking of gorgeous music, I can't read Sonnet XVIII with thinking of another haunting set of lyrics on summer and mutability:

100 Best-Loved Poems: Christopher Marlowe, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"

Christopher Marlowe
THE PASSIONATE SHEPHERD TO HIS LOVE

Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Or woods or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies;
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle.

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair-lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold.

A belt of straw and ivy-buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my Love.

The shepherd swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my Love.

Marlowe's poem is perhaps the most well-known example of pastoral lyric in English, unless you count "Mary Had a Little Lamb" or "Baa Baa Black Sheep." According to the conventions of pastoral, lovers are poet-shepherds or "swains" and beloveds are shepherdesses: life is a big green illusion full of softly piped airs and classical symbology. Nymphs and satyrs roam the woods, and there are lots of echoes. Somewhere off away from the pastorality is the court, populated by a vaguely benevolent aristocracy that is still criticized (gently, usually) for its hypocrisy and pretension. That's the short lecture.

Marlowe is justly celebrated for making huge strides in the use of blank verse in drama ("Marlowe's mighty line," in Ben Jonson's words). Shakespeare is sometimes imitative of Marlowe's style in his early work. "The Passionate Shepherd" is about as far as you can get from the stirring bombast of plays like Tamburlaine the Great and Doctor Faustus. It's a fluffy little ditty, and little more. Not that it doesn't deserve its popularity: it belongs in the same category as "You Are My Sunshine," "Clouds Will Soon Roll By," "Please Please Me," or "Baby Love." Most of its prosodic chops are in the second stanza, where "shallow rivers" give subtle way to "falls," pooling gracefully into the four-word final line, which makes an elegant, near-chiastic figure out of the alliterative homology of "melodious" and "madrigals," framing the simple subject/verb core "birds sing." The rhyme of "falls" and "madrigals" is so muted as to be nearly imperceptible, striking the ear like the faint trickling of the water itself. From there on, the poem is mostly just a list of shepherd bling.

As with the Wyatt poem I discussed earlier, there are different versions of this text, and I'm not sure how much I trust the Dover editor in accurately reproducing any one of them, but it's close enough, and I'm just going to go with it. The Dover collection doesn't include any of the "answer poems" to Marlowe's lyric, most famously Sir Walter Ralegh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd": you can read that one here. You can also read both Marlowe's and Ralegh's versions, followed by all-new X-rated imitations of each, here.

Rodney Koeneke on The New Talkies in Portland

If you missed The New Talkies Neo-Benshi event in Portland a couple weeks ago, the next best thing is reading Rodney Koeneke's just-completed series of blogposts on it at Modern Americans.

* David Larsen doing Logan's Run

* Maryrose Larkin doing The Passion of Jeanne D'Arc

* Leo Daedalus and David Abel doing Solaris

* Rodney Koeneke doing Mary Poppins (all he provides us from his own presentation, which he previewed at the Flarf Festival a week earlier, is a picture, but I can tell you that it's an elegaically whimsical treatment involving the lost language of the Etruscans, the perils of speaking for others, and the potential carcinogenic properties of Englishness--and Konrad Steiner has left a nice long discussion in the comment box)

* Cynthia Sailers doing The Passion of Anna

* Kaia Sand doing the home movies of midcentury Oregon machinist William Cheney

* Konrad Steiner doing Minority Report

* Mac McGinnes doing Judex (from a text by Norma Cole)