Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare (A Short Explanation)

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 owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st 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.

• This poem is about love and the appreciation of beauty by the persona to his beloved.
• A summer's day is a beautiful day, yet the persona feels that his beloved's beauty surpasses that of a summer's day.
• To him, she is more beautiful.
• A summer's day can be:

- too windy

- too short

- too hot as the sun shines so brightly

- cloudy

• He continues by saying that everything on earth will die and perish, but her beauty will last forever even when she dies.
• She will be immortalised as long as someone reads this sonnet.