Sonnet 18 - Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day by William Shakespeare

Introduction
This is the eighteenth poem in William Shakespeare’s huge series of sonnets published in 1609.
By that time, Shakespeare was already a hot shot, with his most famous plays behind him. So,
over a couple of years, Shakespeare sat down and wrote 154 of these little poems. All of them are
sonnets, but Sonnet 18 is probably the most famous and widely read.

Why? First, it is the perfect example of the sonnet form, so it is great for teaching, but it is also a
great point of access for one of the major issues in all of Shakespeare: the weird relationship
between an author, his subject matter, and his audience.

Shakespeare's sonnets are considered a treasure trove for trying to understand his personal life.
Not much is known about him, but scholars have made tons of inferences based largely on these
poems. The first seventeen sonnets are thought to be Shakespeare addressing a young man and
telling him to go make some babies. The last sonnets are thought to be written to Shakespeare’s
mistress, whom scholars call the "Dark Lady." The middle poems, though, of which Sonnet 18 is
the first, are generally thought to be love poems directed at a young man (look at Sonnet 20,
where this is more obvious). What’s the nature of this love? Paternal? Brotherly? Affectionate?
Sexual? You decide.

Relevance
So how come Sonnet 18 is probably the most easily recognizable poem in the English language?
Well, there is the cynical answer: the poem lends itself well to a poetry class, so every high
schooler in the English-speaking world must read it.

But we think there is another, equally important reason everybody loves this poem: it points toward
some basic self-obsession we all have trouble avoiding. Now, we are big fans of love and art, but
even we must admit that the two share a funny connection. We tend to idealize love as that feeling
where you care about someone else even more than you do about yourself; you would do
anything for them. We also like to think of the artist as offering up his life and his work for the
beautification and betterment of society.

"No," says William Shakespeare, "we are all ego centrical." By 1609, Shakespeare was a star, and
he knew it, so in this poem he reminds everyone, a bit tongue-in-cheek, "it is all about me." It is
also amazing that an artist and lover in the early 1600s realized that the whole idea of love-and-
art-as-selfless-sacrifices is a bit of a hoax. Whether we think the voice speaking this poem belongs
Shakespeare or a character he has created, it is great to watch a poet throw down the pretense of
a flowery, beautiful love poem, and instead admit that he is egotistical.

Sonnet 18 - Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day by William Shakespeare

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, 5
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,

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Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, 10
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.

Summary
The speaker begins by asking whether he should or will compare "thee" to a summer day. He says
that his beloved is more lovely and more even-tempered. He then runs off a list of reasons why
summer is not all that great: winds shake the buds that emerged in Spring, summer ends too
quickly, and the sun can get too hot or be obscured by clouds.

He goes on, saying that everything beautiful eventually fades by chance or by nature’s inevitable
changes. Coming back to the beloved, though, he argues that his or her summer (or happy,
beautiful years) won’t go away, nor will his or her beauty fade away. Moreover, death will never be
able to take the beloved, since the beloved exists in eternal lines (meaning poetry). The speaker
concludes that as long as humans exist and can see (so as to read), the poem he is writing will
live on, allowing the beloved to keep living as well.

Section I (lines 1-8) Summary

Lines 1-2
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

 The speaker starts by asking or wondering out loud whether he ought to compare whomever
he is speaking to with a summer’s day.
 Instead of thinking about that further, he and us a thesis of sorts. The object of his
description is more "lovely" and more "temperate" than a summer’s day.
 "Lovely" is easy enough, but how about that "temperate"? The meaning that comes to mind
first is just "even-keeled" or "restrained," but "temperate" also introduces, by way of a double
meaning, the theme of internal and external "weather." "Temperate," refers to an area with
mild temperatures, but also, in Shakespeare’s time, would have referred to a balance of the
"humours."
 No need to explain this in detail, but basically doctors since Ancient Greece had believed that
human behavior was dictated by the relative amount of particular kinds of fluids in the body
( they were blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm).
 By the early 1600s, this theory was being strongly challenged, but people in Shakespeare’s
audience would have known that "temperate" meant that someone had the right amount of
those different fluids.
 The other important issue these lines bring up is the question of "thee." Normally, we would
just assume that the object of the poem is his lover, and leave it at that. But with
Shakespeare, these things are always complicated.
 What can we tell about the relationship between the speaker and his addressee from the way
he addresses "thee"?
 For the moment, all we can really tell is this: the speaker doesn’t seem to care much what
"thee" thinks. He does ask whether he ought to make this comparison, but he certainly does
not wait long (or at all) for an answer.
 So is he just wondering out loud here, pretending "thee" is present?
 Could "thee" also be us readers? Does some small part of you imagine that Shakespeare
might be asking you, the reader, whether you want him to compare you to a summer’s day?
Keep that in mind as you go through the poem.
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  Finally, just a note on the meter here:
 Read those first two lines out loud. Notice how they’re kind of bouncy? That’s the iambic
pentameter: "compare thee to a summer’s day."
 The pronoun "I" is a stressed syllable in the first line, but the pronoun "Thou" is unstressed in
the second line. Guess who is going to be the real subject of this poem.

Lines 3-4
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

 Here the speaker begins to personify nature. In other words, it sounds like he is talking about
a person.
 Strong summer winds threaten those new flower buds that popped up in May, and summer
does not last very long.
 The way he describes the short summer, though, is what is interesting. Summer has a
"lease" on the weather; like a person, summer can enter into, and must abide by,
agreements.
 The point here is clear enough: the summer is fated to end.
 Isn’t summer also fated to begin every year once again? Can the summer possibly have "too
short a date," if it happens an infinite number of times? Isn’t it, in a meaningful sense,
immortal?
 Keep this in mind as you read on.

Lines 5-6
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;

 Here comes the major personification of nature. Put simply, the speaker is saying sometimes
the sun is too hot, and other times you cannot even see it at all (hidden, we assume, by
clouds).
 But instead of being boring, he calls the sun the "eye of heaven," refers to it using the word
"his," and gives it a "complexion," which generally means refers to the skin of the face.
 Notice how much more information about the summer we’re getting than we are about the
beloved. Indeed, the speaker is carefully describing the summer individually, and even in
human terms, while he only describes "thee" in one line and only relative to the summer.
 "Complexion," , is especially interesting, as it brings back the whole "humours" theme we
saw in "temperate."
 "Complexion" used to be used to describe someone’s health, specifically about their balance
of humours. Thus, we see here again that the speaker is combining descriptions of external
weather phenomena with internal balance.

Lines 7-8
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;

 With these lines, the speaker gets even broader in his philosophy, declaring that everything
beautiful must eventually fade away and lose its charm, either by chance or by the natural
flow of time.
 What exactly does "untrimm’d" refer to?
 We might read it as what happens to "fair" or beautiful things. By that reading, things that are
beautiful eventually lose their trimmings, or their decorations, and thus fade from beauty.

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  On the other hand, "untrimm’d" is also a term from sailing, as you "trim," or adjust, the sails to
take advantage of the wind. This gives "untrimm’d" a completely opposite meaning; instead
of "made ugly and plain by natural changes," it means "unchanged in the face of nature’s
natural changes."
 Here, then, we are subtly prepared for the turn we’re about to see in…

Section II (lines 9-14) Summary

Lines 9-10
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

 The turn! See the "Form and Meter" section for more on line 9 in sonnets, but here’s a
classic example of a "turn."
 Suddenly (though it was foreshadowed in line 8), the tone and direction of the poem changes
dramatically. Moving on from insulting summer and the limitations inherent in nature, the
speaker pronounces that the beloved he is speaking to isn’t subject to all of these rules he
has laid out.
 The speaker argues that, unlike the real summer, his beloved’s summer (by which he means
beautiful, happy years) will never go away, nor will the beloved lose his/her beauty.
 But remember what we mentioned in line 4? The summer in real life is an "eternal summer,"
since it comes back every year for all eternity. Just like we saw with all the personifications of
nature in the previous lines, we notice here that "thee" and the "summer’s day" are really
quite similar.
 Both can fade away or, depending on how you look at it, be eternal, and both can be
personified. That is why here, at line 9, the poet switches direction – both the beloved and
nature are threatened mainly by time, and it is only through this third force (poetry), that they
can live on.
 It’s also worth picking up on that word "ow’st." That apostrophe might be contracting "ownest"
or "owest," and both work nicely. Either the beloved won’t lose the beauty he/she possesses
("owns"), or won’t have to return the beauty he/she borrowed from nature and now owes
back.
 These readings both resonate well with line 4, in which the speaker described the summer
months as a "lease," or a temporary ownership that had to be returned.

Lines 11-12
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;

 In another bit of personification (so far we’ve had summer and the sun), the speaker
introduces death.
 Death, the speaker claims, won’t get a chance to claim the beloved in the valley of the
shadow of death (this death’s shadow idea is from Psalm 23:4), since he/she is immortal.
 The general meaning of line 12 (you are eternal) is easier to see if you read the line as a
metaphor. As a metaphor, "lines to time" refers to a poem, since they are lines set to a
meter, or time.
 Here the poet is making two bold claims: first, that his poem is "eternal," and second, that it
nourishes and develops "thee," as it is where he/she can "grow."
 Now this willingness to discuss the fact that he is writing a poem within the poem itself is
amazing.

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  If you were thinking this poem was a love letter to a beloved, you can forget it. This is a poem
written to be read by an audience, and that audience, by continuing to read the poem, will try
to make the beloved grow into a character, and in turn make him/her immortal.

Lines 13-14
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

 The couplet, in the end, is just a fuller admission of what the speaker points toward in line 12.
 This poem will continue to be read, and the beloved will continue to be analysed and re-
analysed for all time.
 In other words, by allowing us to try to give life to "thee" (figuring out who he/she was), the
speaker and the poem itself give "thee" life.
 In other words: as long as men live and can read, this poem will continue to live, and so keep
"thee" alive.
 But let us examine the language more closely. First, we have got some more personification:
technically, eyes do not really "see," and poems certainly do not "live."
 Also, it is worth noting the incredible arrogance here: why should we believe that as long as
humankind exists, this poem will continue to live? Can’t we imagine a world in which every
copy of this poem were burned, and so "thee" would stop living?
 Even if people are still reading the poem, what kind of "life" is it that the beloved will be
leading? This does not sound like heaven. The beloved cannot make any choices for his or
her self, is not conscious, and can only be recognized as the poet described him or her.
 In fact, we ought to wonder whether it is "thee" who will be alive, or rather the poet’s (very
limited) representation of "thee."
 Remember how in line 9 we noted that summer could also be eternal? Well, the end of this
poem makes you wonder. Why is the beloved eternal but not summer? Just like summer, the
beloved is going to fade away in real life, and just like summer, the beloved has been written
about and preserved in a poem. How come, by the end of the poem, it is only "thee" who
lives on and not nature?
 Finally, remember how back in line 1 we were already wondering if "thee" might not just be
the speaker’s lover, but also us readers? Now the speaker has revealed himself as not just a
lover, but also as a writer of poetry.
 The speaker is talking to "thee," and that speaker is actually the poet. Now who do poets
write for? That is right, for us readers.
 We have three conditions here: the speaker speaks only to "thee," the writer speaks only to
us, and the speaker and writer are the same thing. Doesn’t that mean, then, that "thee," is
the same as "us"?
 Basically, the speaker here is speaking to all of mankind. All of us feel this pressure of
mortality, but here Shakespeare crystallizes that anxiety in a poem, so that this idea of
mankind will live on forever.
 The last lines, then, can be read as circular: "so long as mankind lives, mankind will continue
to live."
 These last two lines hammer home something we suspected from those very first pronouns:
this speaker seems more interested in himself and his abilities as a poet than the qualities of
his addressee.

Symbol Analysis: Change, Fate, and Eternity

However much it might look as if he is praising a beloved, this poet is definitely more concerned
with blowing his own horn. You could sum up the poem like this: "Dear Beloved: You are better
than a summer’s day. But only because I can make you eternal by writing about you. Love,
Shakespeare." That message is why images and symbols of time, decay, and eternity are all over
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this poem. Whether or not we think the beloved is made immortal (or just more immortal than the
summer’s day) is up in the air, but it’s certainly what the speaker wants you to think.

 Line 4: This is where the speaker starts pointing to how short summer feels. Using
personification and metaphor, the speaker suggests that summer has taken out a lease on
the weather, which must be returned at the end of the summer. Summer is treated like a
home-renter, while the weather is treated like a real-estate property.
 Lines 7-8: These lines give us the problem (everything is going to fade away) that the poet is
going to work against.
 Lines 9-12: These lines are full of all sorts of figurative language, all pointing to how the
speaker is going to save the beloved from the fate of fading away. The beloved’s life is
described in a metaphor as a "summer," and then his or her beauty is described in another
metaphor as a commodity than can be owned or owed. Death is then personified, as the
overseer of the shade (a metaphor itself for an afterlife). Finally the "lines to time" are a
metaphor for poetry, which will ultimately save the beloved, and "eternal" is a parallel with
"eternal summer" in line 9.
 Lines 13-14: What is so interesting about these lines is that it is hard to tell whether the
speaker is using figurative language or not. Does he mean that the poem is alive, and that it
will keep the beloved alive? Well, it depends what we mean by "alive." If we read alive
scientifically, as in breathing and thinking, well then alive is a metaphor. But if we read it as
describing a continued existence of some kind, well then maybe he does mean it literally,
since surely the poem and the beloved exist for us in some sense.

Symbol Analysis: Poetry

If the major question of this poem is how to become immortal, and more wonderful than a
summer’s day, the speaker’s answer is poetry. For that reason, poetry takes on an inflated
importance in the poem, and is attended by dramatic, powerful language.

 Line 1: This rhetorical question accomplishes a lot, including setting down the main axis of
comparison in the poem, also implying that the speaker is only making a show of caring what
we readers or the beloved think (since he clearly can’t care how or whether we answer him).
In addition to these roles, though, the word "compare" gives this line a special charge, since
it is a word that is so closely tied up with the role of poetry. If you were to try to define poetry,
one thing you might say is that poets really like to compare things that are dissimilar and
show they can be connected. In a sense, then, we can read this line as "should I write a
poem about you?" In that way, the speaker has already made the act of writing poetry an
issue in this poem, and, as we will see, his answer to this question is obviously, "yes, I
should write a poem about you, since I can make you immortal!"
 Lines 12-14: These lines are where the poet finally begins to talk about poetry more clearly.
The phrase "lines to time," creates a metaphor for poetry, since poetry is lines of words set to
a time, or meter. Then, using a parallel in the last two lines, he asserts that as long as
humans live, his poetry will survive, and, in turn, so too will the beloved. The question is what
he means by the poem giving "life" to the beloved. It is in some sense a metaphor since the
poem is not about to perform CPR on the beloved’s corpse every time the poem is read. But
if "life" just means having someone think about you, then sure, the poem could give life to the
beloved.

Symbol Analysis: Personified Nature

From the beginning of the poem, the speaker tries to set up a contrast between the beloved and a
summer’s day. He tries hard to distinguish them, ultimately arguing that the beloved, unlike nature,
will be saved by the force and permanence of his poetry. The thing is, the contrast does not really
work, since summer seems much more eternal than the beloved. If being written about preserves
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immortality, then the summer ought to be immortal because the speaker’s writing about it as well.
Then there is the fact that summer is, in some sense, immortal, since it returns in full force every
year.

 Line 1: This is a rhetorical question, as the speaker does not care how or whether we answer
him, and it also introduces what will be the main metaphor of the poem, as the summer’s day
will be discussed using concepts more literally applicable to the beloved than to summer
itself.
 Line 2: "Temperate" is a pun, since it carries two important meanings here. When applied to
the beloved, it means "showing moderation or self-restraint," but when applied to the
summer’s day it means, "having mild temperatures."
 Lines 3-4: This is all personification here. Even if winds might really be able to "shake"
things, and buds could be described as "darling," these are both words more often applied to
human actions. The next line is a much more obvious case of personification, as summer
cannot literally take out a lease on anything. Note also that this implies a metaphor of the
weather as a rentable property. Also, the "darling buds" introduce an extended metaphor of
plant life and the conditions needed to sustain life that runs through the rest of the poem
 Lines 5-6: There is the apparent opposition here, in that sometimes the weather is too hot,
and sometimes it is too cold. But there is also personification with "eye" and "complexion."
What is more, "complexion" does not just mean the appearance of the face, but also had a
second meaning in Shakespeare’s time, referring to someone’s general internal well-being.
Note also that the plant life extended metaphor is continued in "shines" and "dimm’d," since
plants need light to flourish.
 Line 9: Here the personification is inverted: instead of describing nature in human terms, the
speaker is describing the beloved in the terms of nature, giving him or her an "eternal
summer" which could not literally apply.
 Line 11: "Shade" makes for a continuation of the plant life extended metaphor, since if you
are a plant stuck in the shade, that is sad news. "Shade" is also a pun, because it can mean
"ghost."
 Line 12: The plant life extended metaphor is completed, as the speaker finally points out a
way that plants can "grow," instead of these problems they faced in previous lines of the
poem. Now what is this way? Well, perhaps aside from suggesting poetry, "lines to time"
could also conjure up an image of plants lined up in rows in a farm. In other words, plants
need to be organized and cultivated by humans to survive. This works well with the main
theme in the rest of the poem: that the beloved needs to be organized and developed by the
poet to survive.

Symbol Analysis: Leases and Debt

The speaker of "Sonnet 18" is really trying to simplify nature and fate, since he is trying to hurdle
over their limitations with his poetry. One way he does it is to reduce them to economic
transactions – something simple, easy to understand, and most importantly, work around.

 Line 4: He describes summer as having a "lease" over the weather. This is personification,
since summer could not hold a lease, but for the purposes of this theme, it is also a
metaphor, since the weather is not actually a product that can be bought, sold, or rented.
 Line 10: Here the speaker jumps back into the economics language, using both a metaphor
and a pun. The metaphor is like what we saw in line 4: here beauty, instead of the weather,
is what can be bought, sold, and rented. But here there is also a pun with the word "ow’st,"
as it could mean both "owest" and "ownest." Either way, he is still playing with the property
metaphor, but we can wonder whether the beloved’s beauty is something he or she owns, or
something that he or she has only borrowed, and would have to return if not for the speaker’s
poetry.

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Analysis: Form and Meter

A Shakespearean Sonnet in Iambic Pentameter

This is a classic Shakespearean sonnet with fourteen lines in very regular iambic pentameter.
Except for a couple relatively strong first syllables (and even these are debatable), there are
basically no deviations from the meter. There are not even any lines that flow over into the next
line – every single line is end-stopped. There are two quatrains (groups of four lines), followed by
a third quatrain in which the tone of the poem shifts a bit, which is in turn followed by a rhyming
couplet (two lines) that wraps the poem up. The rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

The form of this sonnet is also notable for being a perfect model of the Shakespearean sonnet
form. Just as in older Italian sonnets by which the English sonnets (later to be called
Shakespearean sonnets) were inspired, the ninth line introduces a meaningful change in tone or
position. Here Shakespeare switches from insulting summer to describing the immortality of his
beloved. This poem also has the uniquely English twist of a concluding rhyming couplet that
partially sums up and partially redefines what came before it. In this case, the closing lines have
the feel of a cute little poem of their own, making it clear that the poet’s abilities were the subject of
this poem all along.

Do not be fooled, though: beyond the form, this is not your stereotypical sonnet. The main reason
is that sonnets, at least before Shakespeare was writing, were almost exclusively love poems.
Certainly this poem has some of the qualities of a love poem, but, to say the least, this poem isn’t
just a poet’s outpouring of love for someone else.

Analysis: Speaker
It is a good rule of thumb to avoid calling the speaker of a poem by the name of the author. The
idea is that the speaker in a work of literature, describing the subject matter, could very well be
(and often is) another kind of character created by the author.

But Shakespeare makes things tricky: what if that speaker acknowledges that he is writing a
poem? Doesn’t that mean he is Shakespeare, the writer of this poem? Well, this certainly makes
the speaker look a lot more like the Bard, since this is a poem in a book of poems by William
Shakespeare. Still, we must keep in mind that they’re not necessarily the same, since we can
easily imagine Shakespeare inventing a character who writes poems. For that reason, we will
keep calling him the speaker instead of Shakespeare.

Now, this speaker is arrogant. The poem is ego centrical from start to finish. That rhetorical
question to open things up? It is just that: rhetorical. He knows we are not about to say, "No, you
shan’t compare anyone to a summer’s day." He’s got us right where he wants us, and by asking a
question we can’t possibly answer, he is already on a power trip, since we are not about to stop
reading this little 14-line poem.

In the second line he makes his one and only concession to "thee," recognizing that he or she is
"lovely" and "temperate," but check out the stresses in these first two lines: "I" is a stressed
syllable but "thee" and "thou" aren’t! And from then on it is even more brazen self-congratulation.
He goes into a bit of indulgent, very poetry-ish personification of summer and nature, and then
swoops in for his grand entrance as God, announcing: "Behold my power, for I have made you,
unlike summer, immortal."

Here is what makes it extra irritating: he is right. He thinks he is a star and he is spot on – if you
are reading the poem (which you just did), he has given "thee" new life, or at least "life" as he
defines it, which is being analyzed and admired. But give that a second thought: has he really
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given the beloved something summer does not have? Isn’t he blowing his own trumpet a bit? The
summer is discussed and admired eternally, since it comes around every year, and so is not all
that different than the beloved as presented in the poem. You could, then, see the speaker as a
delusional self-flatterer, strutting his stuff on the stage.

Analysis: Setting
Imagine a poet sitting out in a field on a warm but breezy summer day, contemplating the nature of
existence and jotting down some poetic philosophy. This is thinking weather. Anyway, even if the
weather can get annoying, with bursts of heat and moments of shade, the sun eventually shines
through the clouds.

Analysis: Sound Check

When we read this poem out loud, the first thing that strikes us is how neat the whole thing is. It is
so perfectly tied up. Every single line bounces along in perfect iambic pentameter, with no
enjambment (lines running on into the next lines with no pause at the end of the line). Basically,
the sound of this poem is perfect. Now on one hand that is great, because it is elegant poetry, but
on the other hand there’s something weird about it, and it works well with the dominant themes of
the poem.

Basically, the poem is almost too perfect. If the speaker were truly enraptured in love and
completely obsessed with his beloved, we might suspect his words to come out a bit awkwardly as
he tries to organize his intensely emotional thoughts into symbols. Instead, this poem is really
crafted and sounds planned. In fact, the poem is so carefully put together that it gives us readers
almost no leeway in how we choose to read it. Look at those last two lines: "So long as men can
breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." Just try to read that in any
way other than a straightforward iambic pentameter. The speaker has completely locked us into
his way of reading the poem. In sum, then, the sound helps us notice that this poet is more of a
schemer than a lover.

Analysis: Title
Not much to say about the title here. This is indeed a sonnet, and the "Form and Meter" section
describes how Shakespeare made the sonnet form his own. As far as the number eighteen is
concerned, it is only important in that this is the first of the sonnets in which the speaker starts to
address "thee" (often referred to by scholars as "the fair youth") more romantically, where
previously he had been more of a father figure.
Theme of Love
Sonnet 18 opens looking like a traditional love poem, but by the end it is pretty clear that the poet
is much more in love with himself and the poetry he produces than the beloved he is addressing.
In fact, at times it seems like he might harbour some resentment toward the beloved. So if it is a
love poem, it is to the poet.

Theme of Literature and Writing

Like much of Shakespeare’s work, Sonnet 18 is all about writing and expressing one’s self through
language. This is, at its clearest, a poem about the power of the written word over death, fate, and
possibly even love.

Theme of Time
The speaker of Sonnet 18 is absolutely fixated on fate and mortality, but believes he has come up
with an effective time machine: poetry. Instead of contemplating a beautiful summer’s day, this
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speaker cannot stop thinking about how everything in life is temporary and fleeting. No need to
fear, though – the hero-poet steps in and announces that, by artistically representing his beloved,
he can save him or her from the ravages of time. "Time," then, is the intersection of the "Literature
and Writing" theme and the "Man and the Natural World" theme. Man, in the natural world, cannot
avoid being subject to time, but it is through literature, the poet argues, that he can free himself.

Theme of Man and the Natural World

On one level, Sonnet 18 is clearly concerned with the relationship between man and the eventual,
inescapable death he will encounter in nature. On another level, the poet also seems fascinated
by the relationship between seasonal weather and personal, internal "weather" and balance.

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