A sonnet of celebration in perspective

Cat­alo­nia Today wants to cel­e­brate Shake­speare by re­pro­duc­ing son­net XVIII on this page. This poem is cer­tainly the most fa­mous in Shake­speare's se­quence of son­nets and may even be the most fa­mous lyric poem in Eng­lish. When read as a sin­gle poem on its own, its mean­ing seems pretty clear: a cel­e­bra­tion of the phys­i­cal and spir­i­tual qual­i­ties of the beloved, a theme with a long tra­di­tion in Re­nais­sance po­etry. The poet praises the sum­mer­like beauty of an­other per­son and in­sists that the beloved's “eter­nal sum­mer” shall not fade pre­cisely be­cause it is em­bod­ied in the son­net. In other words, the beloved will be for­ever im­mor­talised thanks to the poet's verse. There's no de­tailed de­scrip­tion, in this case, of the beauty of the beloved's hair, eyes, lips, and so on. The sub­ject is de­scribed in more gen­eral terms, as some­one who is “more lovely and tem­per­ate” than a sum­mer's day, that is, some­one with­out the un­pleas­ant ex­tremes of sum­mer's oc­ca­sional winds or heat.

But when we read the poem in the se­quence of Shake­speare's col­lec­tion of 154 son­nets, its mean­ing turns out to be quite dif­fer­ent from what read­ers usu­ally as­sume. For one thing, we soon dis­cover that the son­net is ad­dressed not to a woman but to a young man of higher so­cial stand­ing. The older poet has al­ready –in the pre­ced­ing 17 son­nets of the se­quence– praised the beauty of the young man and en­cour­aged and urged him to pro­duce a child to pre­serve that beauty. The con­clud­ing cou­plet of son­net XVII makes that clear: “But were some child of yours alive that time, / You should live twice – in it and in my rime”. The com­bined ef­fects, as it were, of sex­ual pro­cre­ation and being pre­sent in the poet's “rhyme” would se­cure the young man's im­mor­tal­ity. But son­net XVIII comes at a mo­ment when the poet seems to have re­ceived a re­sponse of rec­i­p­ro­cal af­fec­tion and he now feels tri­umphant in the ex­pres­sion of his feel­ings of self-ful­fill­ment. No more talk now of pro­cre­ation. He feels “cho­sen” as a per­son and as a poet and is eager to demon­strate his tal­ents to the youth, so that, the very fa­mous first line could be read not only as con­ven­tional praise but also as the poet show­ing off his abil­i­ties. Shake­speare scholar, Neil Ruden­s­tine, has re­cently sug­gested that what the poet is re­ally say­ing is: “I can do what­ever you pre­fer: shall I write some­thing that has to do with spring, or would you like a com­par­i­son to a sum­mer's day”.

Son­net XVIII sig­nals a mo­ment of op­ti­mism and self-con­fi­dence in the se­quence. A cel­e­bra­tion of praise for a love not tainted yet with traces of Time or Death. Love is cel­e­brated but has not been re­ally tested. As the son­net se­quence de­vel­ops, Shake­speare in­tro­duces and ex­plores the ef­fects of a se­ries of be­tray­als or trans­gres­sions by the two main char­ac­ters and their own un­easy re­la­tion­ship with a Dark Lady. Pla­tonic or ideal love has to con­front the ad­ver­si­ties of time, the fad­ing of beauty, and the ur­gen­cies of lust. In the end, Shake­speare's son­nets –read as a whole– be­come one of the most mem­o­rable, deep, and mov­ing re­flec­tions on the na­ture of human love ever writ­ten.