Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day
Throughout the first twenty-six Sonnets, it is apparent that William Shakespeare is urging a very young, very attractive man to marry and beget and heir.
From fairest creatures we desire increase that thereby beauty's rose might never die.
But as the riper should by time decease his tender heir might bear his memory.
In the second sonnet Shakespeare reminds the young man that life is all to fleeting.
When forty winters shall besiege your brow and dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field. The youth's proud livery so gazed on now, Will be a tattered weed of little worth held.
By Sonnet three he is urging the young man that he should be turning his thoughts to those of procreation:
'Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest, now is the time that face should form another'.
Given the evidence of Shakespeare's connection with the Earl of Southampton, there is a likelihood that the person to whom those first sonnets are addressed is Henry Wriothesley, the third earl of Southampton, and that being the case it is to him that Shakespeare addresses his most famous sonnet and some of his most beautiful verse.
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 is all too short a date.
Sometime, too hot the eye of heaven shines
and often his gold complexion dimmed
And every fair from fair sometime declines
By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thow owest.
Nor shall death brag thou wanderest 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.
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