Sonnet 18

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will compare you to a summer's day), but the answer will come out quite in favor of the lover over the aspects of the object the lover is being compared to.

That would, in fact, be the traditional idea as executed by a competent Hallmark card writer. However, as the poem goes on we realize that Shakespeare's sonnet plumbs and climbs multiple levels until finally the poem isn't just about love and lovers, but about decay and the poem itself.

"Temperate" and "lovely" are the key descriptors of lines one and two. Everything's calm, the skys are blue, but then we have a bit of a wind picking up in line three, a cool stiff breeze perhaps that "shakes the darling buds of May". Deployed here, the wind efficiently reminds the reader that fall - or is it The Fall - even in late spring is never too far off or too far behind. Or, as the next line notes so well "summer's lease hath all to short a date."

So what we have here at the 1/4 way mark is a temperate poem of love with hints of ...

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