When A Love Poem Isn't

When A Love Poem Isn’t

In Anglo-American culture, William Shakespeare’s sonnets are conventionally thought to represent the best in love poetry. Sometimes a love poem isn’t a love poem, however, and sometimes its not being a love poem makes it, paradoxically, a better love poem, or at least a more surprising one. Consider Shakespeare’s Sonnet #18:

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:

Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed;

And every fair from fair sometimes declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed;

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 live to thee.

You have to like almost any poem that begins with a simple question. Rhetorically, the question opens the poem like a well-made key.

The speaker of the poem doesn’t answer the question directly, however. Implicitly, he answers, “Yes and No.” Yes, I’ll go through the exercise of comparing you, or at least contrasting you, to summer—which he does in lines 2 through 8. But implicitly he also answers, No. That is, he can make the comparison, but the comparison turns out to be no good, because summer has its flaws and doesn’t measure up to “thee”—the woman or man about whom the poem is written. The convention of love poetry is to compare the lover in a way that works. Shakespeare deliberately offers a comparison that falls short. He’s having fun with the convention of comparing; it’s a very jazzy thing to do. One imagines a jazz musician playing and gently mocking a melodic line, both at once. Lines 1 through 8, then, feature the poet flexing poetic muscles—making a comparison and showing the inadequacy of the comparison simultaneously.

“But thy eternal summer shall not fade.” That sounds like a nice compliment to pay a lover, there in line 9. Lines 10 through 14 demonstrate that the speaker is not really complimenting the lover, however. He’s complimenting himself. He’s arguing that the lover’s “eternal summer” and her or his “fairness” (beauty) will last precisely as long as Sonnet #18 shall last, and the prediction is that Sonnet # 18 will last as long as men can breathe, or eyes can see: a very long time, asthma and cataracts notwithstanding.

The speaker of the poem must, we may conclude, like this person very much, perhaps even love her or him. But the poem is mainly self-admiring. First, it shows off ("watch me compare thee to summer and then critique the comparison"). Then it predicts a long life for itself, and it predicts that it this long-lived poem, a kind of monument to the person (thee) will have been built.

Of course, this all makes Sonnet #18 a better love poem, at least a less conventional one, than we might have expected. It’s about love of language and poetry, and it’s about liking someone so much that you’ll set out to write a magnificent poem about her or him. But a straight-up “I love you” poem it isn’t. So much the better. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Well, yes and no, my dear . . . .

And how many poets can predict a long life for their poetry—and turn out to be right? Nicely done, Bill.