Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

(Sonnet 18)
William Shakespeare, 1564 - 1616

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.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
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.
Shakespeare famously asks, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’
(Sonnet 18, 1609). If he were to make such a comparison, quite obviously, the
person in question would become identifi ed with certain qualities or aspects
or ideas normally associated with a summer’s day. So, we might start thinking
of that person as bright and sunshiny. We might associate them with fl owers
in bloom, or lambs leaping in green fi elds. The associations would generally
be positive and connected with nature. Interestingly, there would be no real
reason not to associate the person with hay fever, sunburn or drought. But as
we read this fi rst line of Shakespeare’s sonnet such negativity does not enter
our minds. There is something very immediate about the chains of association
the comparison gives rise to. We are automatically guided by conventions, by
powerful frameworks of analogy, of which we are not even explicitly aware.
The associations seem to be intuitive and are unleashed in a momentary rush.
Yet what happens is actually quite complex:

1. The qualities of a summer’s day have been transferred onto the person.
2. There is something subjective about this transfer: as readers, we each might
instinctively associate a summer’s day with diff ering things, and so we will
have slightly diff ering experiences when processing the comparison.
3. Despite this indeterminacy, there is also something immediate and palpable
about the image. Therefore, we have something incongruously
defi nite and indeterminate.
4. Multilayered chains of association have been manipulated, but in the fl ash
of an instant. We have the surprise of recognition. Something abstract has
happened, but with a sensuous result.
5. The comparison creates a paradoxical fusion. Think about the phrase ‘the
surprise of recognition’: surprise indicates something unexpected has happened,
while recognition indicates something innate has been revealed.
We have strangeness and familiarity, a disturbance and deepening of
knowledge about this person.
6. Certain qualities have been transferred, while the person and the summer’s
day remain as distinct phenomena. As with rhyme, identity has
been established, while diff erence has been maintained.
7. The exchange of qualities has arisen out of experience (we associate a
summer’s day with good things), but has not been circumscribed by the
physical limitations of empirical, immediate reality. Diff ering dimensions
of experience and reality have converged.
In such ways, fi gurative imagery messes about with common sense reality.
In tandem with the urge towards sound and musicality, imagery is at the heart
of poetry’s other great and fundamental reason to exist: indulging our inclination,
perhaps our fundamental need, to make things up, to tell lies or, at least,
to stretch the truth or speak of a diff erent kind of truth than that we are used
to. An empiricist or scientist might say fi guration warps reality, but a poetry
reader might say it expands the boundaries of reality. At the very least, if we
compare a loved one with a season, or an entire aspect of nature, then the
parameters of our thoughts about our loved one have been extended, and so,
thus, has our love.