Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, June 3rd, 2004. And today we're going to kick off a week looking at some of William Shakespeare's sonnets. Shakespeare is not only a brilliant dramatist, but a master of the poetic sonnet form. He wrote 154 of them that are collected independently

of his plays. There are a number of sonnets sprinkled throughout or sewn throughout his plays,

but we'll talk about those another time. My hope, too, is to focus on a few of the lesser known or a little more unconventional of those 154 sonnets.

But in order to do that, it seemed important to start with a very familiar and well-known sonnet, probably his most famous and most quoted, and that is

Sonnet 18, which begins, shall I compare thee to a summer's day? I'll read it once, say a few

things about it, and then read it one more time.

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 dimmed, and every fair from fair sometime declines,

by chance or nature's changing course untrimmed. But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

nor lose possession of that fair thou oest. Nor shall death brag thou wanderest 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.

So the speaker in our poem begins by inviting a favorable comparison between the beloved

and the beauties or splendors of a summer day.

And arguably summer days are the best kind of days at least if you took a poll that might come out as the

winner i have my own personal opinions but we won't get into those right now and the two ways in which

the beloved surpasses summer's day are their temperance and loveliness.

It's pretty straightforward to say, you are more lovely than a summer's day.

That's a safe claim, probably the kind of claim you want to be making when you're talking to your beloved.

The second is a little more complicated.

What does it mean to be more temperate than a summer's day?

Well, the poet goes on to explain, a summer's day tends toward extremes.

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