Eternal Lines
William Shakespeare immortalised his lover in verse, as if holding back for ever the ravages of Time.
published 1609
Queen Elizabeth I 1558-1603
William Shakespeare immortalised his lover in verse, as if holding back for ever the ravages of Time.
published 1609
Queen Elizabeth I 1558-1603
Without question, William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 is one of the best known and most beloved poems in the English language. William immortalises his lover in verse, saying that though beauty must pass away all too soon, she and her loveliness will live on in his lines as long as there are men to read them.
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 dimm’d;
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.*
William is not merely saying that his lover’s beauty is lovelier and less changeable than that of an English summer. He is saying that his verses give to her beauty a serenity and a life even beyond age and death, that is, beyond life’s autumn and winter.
That is, all beauty fades eventually, either through mishap or because that is how Nature is. In sailing, sails are ‘trimmed’ (adjusted) to maximise efficiency: similarly, Beauty loses efficiency over time, like a boat that is no longer sailing under full power. ‘Trim’ comes from an Old English word, trymman, meaning ‘make firm, arrange’.
‘That fair thou owest’ is the beauty (being fair of face) that she has borrowed from Time and would normally have to pay back. See The Seikilos Epitaph for a similar sentiment.
That is, Death cannot boast that she must eventually fall into his shadow (see Psalm 23:4) because she has been immortalised in verse, and with each passing year her beauty becomes known more widely, and so paradoxically grows.
William’s lover is made immortal in his verse, and while there are still men to read his lines, his poem (‘this’) will mean that she and her beauty never really die.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.