Sonnet 18

The speaker begins by asking whether he should or will compare "thee" to a summer day. He says that
his beloved is more lovely and more even-tempered. He then runs off a list of reasons why summer isn’t
all that great: winds shake the buds that emerged in Spring, summer ends too quickly, and the sun can
get too hot or be obscured by clouds.

He goes on, saying that everything beautiful eventually fades by chance or by nature’s inevitable
changes. Coming back to the beloved, though, he argues that his or her summer (or happy, beautiful
years) won’t go away, nor will his or her beauty fade away. Moreover, death will never be able to take
the beloved, since the beloved exists in eternal lines (meaning poetry). The speaker concludes that as
long as humans exist and can see (so as to read), the poem he’s writing will live on, allowing the beloved
to keep living as well.

Sonnet 33

Summary

The speaker says that on many mornings he has seen the brilliant sun—a “sovereign eye”—create
heavenly beauty on earth by shining on mountains, meadows, and streams. But the divine sun almost
immediately allows ugly clouds to hide the divine face from the world. Thus disgraced, the sun sneaks
off to the west to set. In this same way, the speaker’s sun (his beloved) shines one morning upon the
speaker, but only for a moment, before the clouds of his region hide him from the speaker. But this
doesn’t diminish the speaker’s love for his beloved at all. If heaven’s sun in the sky can occasionally lose
some of its brightness, then the suns (beloved people) of the world can do the same.

Sonnet 46

Summary

The poet alludes to contradictions within himself when he considers his longing for the sight of the
youth’s good looks and his need to love and be loved by the youth himself. Sonnet 46 thus deals with
the theme of conflict between the poet’s eyes and heart: “Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war / How
to divide the conquest of thy sight.” He says that his heart wants the youth to itself, and the eye would
bar the heart from the youth as well. Legal terminology used in the sonnet reflects contemporary life in
the impaneling of an impartial jury to decide the matter. A verdict is reached when the poet awards the
youth’s outward appearance to the eye and his inner love to the heart.
Sonnet 76

In the first lines of the poem, the speaker address is the Fair Youth through a
series of rhetorical questions. He asked the young man why, unlike other
writers, the speaker’s writing has remained the same. While others change, he
remains the same. The speaker answers his own questions in the second half
of the poem. It is, of course, due to the youth’s presence in his life that his
writing has remained the same. The speaker is unable to write about anything
that does not concern the Fair Youth. 

Because the speaker is well aware of his own attachment to this young man
and the obsessive way that his feelings control his life, he resigned himself to
finding new ways to write about the same topics rather than entirely new
topics.