Canarias, Dianne A.

BSED ENGLISH 3101

Guico, Lyka M.

“DIVE TO SUMMER: CONCEPT OF ETERNAL LOVE THROUGH THE ANALYSIS

OF SYMBLOSIM”
"It isn`t possible to love and be part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love,
ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are
right: Love is eternal." According to E. M. Foster. Thus when you love, you gave everything –it
changes everything. William Shakespeare’s sonnets are world-renowned and are said to have
been written for a “fair youth” (1-126) and a “dark lady” (127-54), but no one is totally certain
for whom they were penned, as they include no definite names and no written evidence. The
sonnets were first published in 1609, seven years before Bard’s death, and their remarkable
quality has kept them in the public eye ever since. “Sonnet 18” is devoted to praising a friend or
lover, traditionally known as “fair youth”. The sonnet itself serves as a guarantee that this
person’s beauty will be sustained. Even death will be silenced because the lines of the poem will
be read by future generations, when speaker/poet and lover and no more, keeping their fair image
alive through the power of verse. In “Sonnet 18”, Shakespeare uses the symbolism of idyllic
English summer’s day, the less-welcome dim sun and the rough winds of autumn to develop the
theme of eternal love.
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” This is the opening line which almost a tease,
reflecting to the speaker’s uncertainty as he attempts to compare his lover to a summer’s day.
This rhetorical question is posed for both the speaker and reader, and even the metrical stance at
this first line is open to conjecture. The image of the perfect English summer’s day is then
surpassed as the second line revealed that the lover is lovelier and more temperate. Lovely is still
quite commonly used in England and carries the same meaning then as it does now (attractive,
nice, and beautiful), while temperate, in Shakespeare’s time, meant gentle-natured, restrained,
moderate and composed. In this line, speaker is asking, in other words, whether it would be
appropriate to compare his friend or lover to something widely regarded as the best and most
beautiful thing possible.
As the sonnet progresses, the speaker concentrate on the ups and downs of weather and
are distanced, taken along on a steady iambic rhythm (except for line five) as quoted below:
“Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date”
It should be noted that at the time the sonnet was written, England had not yet adopted
the Gregorian calendar and May was considered a summer month. Summertime in England is a
hit-and-miss affair weather-wise. Winds blow, rainclouds gather and before you know where you
are, summer has come and gone in a week. The season seems all too short – that’s as true today
as it was in Shakespeare’s time – and people tend to moan when it’s overcast. The speaker is
suggesting that for most people, summer will pass all too quickly, and they will grow old, as in
natural, their beauty fading with the passing of the season. Those stanzas give a solid reason as to
why one cannot compare his lover to summer. Though summer appears to be beautiful, it is not
constant and can be very disappointing if solely relied upon. It also does not last as long as his
lover’s beauty would. Shakespeare describes the fragility and short duration of summer’s beauty.
The use of the word ‘lease’ reminds the readers of fact that everything beautiful remains so for a
limited time only and after a while its beauty will be forcibly taken away.
Shakespeare continues his criticisms of the summer. At this point, however, the speaker
focuses on the imperfection of the sun and explains that it is temporary and, like other aspects of
the summer tends towards unpleasant extremes:
“Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d”
Shakespeare states that the sun, which he personifies and refers to as ‘the eye of heaven’,
can be too hot or blocked from view by the clouds unlike the speaker ‘more temperate’ love.
The rhetorician poses problem fairly explicitly: every beauty will fade either by chance or
through the natural course of time:
“And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed”
The repetition of the word ‘fair’ highlights the fact that this fate is inescapable for
everything that possesses beauty.
The poet uses metaphor and personification to bring life to the Sonnet 18. For example,
he uses figurative speech to presume change, fate, and immortality. He speaks of how he will
internally save his lover’s beauty from fading from the face of the earth (Shakespeare 12).
‘Summer’ as a literary device is used to mean the life of the mistress that should be safe from
fate. Fate, in this case, is portrayed by the use of scorching sun and rough winds. The imagery of
the Sonnet 18 include personified death and rough winds. The poet has even gone further to label
the buds as ‘darling’ (Shakespeare 3). Death serves as a supervisor on ‘its shade’, which is a
metaphor of ‘after life’ (Shakespeare 11). All these actions are related to human beings. ‘Eternal
lines to lines through grows’ (Shakespeare 12) is a praise to the poet’s poems which he says will
last forever so long as ‘men can breathe or eyes can see’, a metaphor symbolizing ‘poet lovers’
will be there to read them (Shakespeare 13).
Sonnet 18 suggests that beauty can only end when the poem ceases to exist. The purpose
of the sonneteer is to make the beauty of her love, and with him her love for her, eternal
constants that do not change with time or circumstances. The poet is fascinated by his mistress
beauty, such that he cannot imagine that beauty was fading from his eyes. The speaker argues
that beauty is constant, and unlike a summer day, is not affected by any changes or fate at all.
The speaker, however, seems to be praising his poem as characterized at the end of the poem,
where he only compares the everlasting beauty to his text. The speaker concludes that the poem
he is writing will live as long as the person exists and can see (read) so that the loved one can
continue living as well. Furthermore, Shakespeare uses Sonnet 18 to praise beauty of his beloved
and to describe all the ways her beauty is preferable to a summer day. The persistence of love
and its power to perpetuate someone is the main theme of this poem.