Shakespeare: Shall I Compare Thee

Ø  Died: April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon, United Kingdom

Ø  38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems

Ø  The sonnets were first published in a 1609 quarto with the full stylised title: SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS (The publisher, Thomas Thorpe)

Ø  The first 17 poems, traditionally called the procreation sonnets, are addressed to the young man, urging him to marry and have children in order to immortalize his beauty by passing it to the next generation.

Ø  Other sonnets express the speaker’s love for the young man; brood upon loneliness, death, and the transience of life; seem to criticise the young man for preferring a rival poet; express ambiguous feelings for the speaker’s mistress; and pun on the poet’s name.

Ø  The final two sonnets are on the “little love-god” Cupid.

Ø  The Sonnets include a dedication to one “Mr. W.H.”

Ø  The initials “T.T..” are taken to refer to the publisher, Thomas Thorpe

Ø  Characters: the Fair Youth, the Speaker (in the sonnets), the Rival Poet, and the Dark Lady.

The rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg. Sonnets using this scheme are known as Shakespearean sonnets.

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 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 life to thee.

the eye of heaven (5): i.e., the sun.

every fair from fair sometime declines (7): i.e., the beauty (fair) of everything beautiful (fair) will fade (declines).
nature’s changing course (8): i.e., the natural changes age brings.

that fair thou ow’st (10): i.e., that beauty you possess.

A.    It is the first poem in the sonnets not to explicitly encourage the young man to have children and ends the procreation series

2.     What is significant about the poem in the context of Shakespeare’s philosophical constructs?

A.    It is the first sonnet where the speaker first attempts to preserve the young man’s beauty for all time through art.

3.     What can “a summer’s day” refer to

A.    A day in summer

B.     Both a day in summer and the summer season

4.     “…summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” What kind of term is used here?

A.       legal terminology

5.     ‘…temperate’ means

A.     evenly-tempered

6.     “By chance” means

A.    By accident [depending on fate]

7.     ‘untrimm’d’ means

A.    Divested of decorations (growth in nature)

8.     “But thy eternal summer shall not fade”. What is the figure of speech?

9.     “Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st”.  Here, the word ‘ow’st’ means

A.    His friend need not return the beauty he borrowed from nature and now owes back.

10.   “Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade”. The image is

A.      Biblical here. [Psalm 23:4]

11.     Shakespeare borrowed the idea of immortality through artistic representation/creation from

A.    Ovid

12.    Can the poem be read as a poem of self-glorification

A.    Yes [the poet talks highly of his skill as a poet]