Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,Īnd summer’s lease hath all too short a date: Guess who’s going to be the real subject of this poem. So do you want to see a cool bit of foreshadowing? The pronoun 'I' is a stressed syllable in the first line, but the pronoun 'Thou' is unstressed in the second line.Notice how they’re kind of bouncy? That’s the iambic pentameter: 'com pare thee to a summer’s day.' Go ahead and read those first two lines out loud.Finally, just a note on the meter here:.Even better, and this is important, could 'thee' also be us readers? Is it just us, or does some small part of you imagine that Shakespeare might be asking you, the reader, whether you want him to compare you to a summer’s day? Keep that on the back burner as you go through the poem.

So is he just wondering out loud here, pretending 'thee' is present?.He does ask whether he ought to make this comparison, but he certainly doesn’t wait long (or at all) for an answer. For the moment, all we can really tell is this: the speaker doesn’t seem to care much what 'thee' thinks.What can we tell about the relationship between the speaker and his addressee from the way he addresses 'thee'?.But with Shakespeare, these things are always complicated. The other important (and less disgusting) issue these lines bring up is the question of 'thee.' Normally, we’d just assume that the object of the poem is his lover, and leave it at that.By the early 1600s, this theory was being strongly challenged, but people in Shakespeare’s audience would have known that 'temperate' meant that someone had the right amount of those different fluids.No need to explain this in great detail, but basically doctors since Ancient Greece had believed that human behavior was dictated by the relative amount of particular kinds of fluids in the body (if you must know, they were blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm.

'Lovely' is easy enough, but how about that 'temperate'? The meaning that comes to mind first is just 'even-keeled' or 'restrained,' but 'temperate' also introduces, by way of a double meaning, the theme of internal and external 'weather.' 'Temperate,' as you might have heard on the Weather Channel, refers to an area with mild temperatures, but also, in Shakespeare’s time, would have referred to a balance of the 'humours.'.

The object of his description is more 'lovely' and more 'temperate' than a summer’s day.

Instead of musing on that further, he jumps right in, and gives us a thesis of sorts.

The speaker starts by asking or wondering out loud whether he ought to compare whomever he’s speaking to with a summer’s day.

Sonnet 18 iambic pentameter analysis