SONNET 18
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.
The Research
I decided to use our library's database to find something scandalous about the sonnets in the spirit of striping history of its clothes of lies. The naked truth is not pretty, but one cannot tear his eyes from it. I have heard that at least a portion of the sonnets were made to a man, but according to Robert Matz the rest might have been written for an African American woman. I do not find interracial relationships to be scandalous, just the lies that other writers have handed down. In the spirit of open mindedness, I decided to read Sonnet 18 as if it were intended for a man. Matz helps pose the sonnet in this position:
"In their own time all the sonnets were potentially scandalous. First, the sonnets to the young man did not simply reproduce the dominant social order. De Grazia emphasizes that the sonnets promote this status quo order by celebrating the fair—that is, aristocratic—young man. But this literary reproduction of the young man's beauty usurps the biological reproduction that the initial sonnets of the sequence contemplate—a point that de Grazia observes in a footnote, but does not pursue.9 In sonnet 18, the "eternal lines" that will preserve the young man past death are those of Shakespeare's sonnets. They recall—only to replace—the family line, the inheritance from father to son that Shakespeare has been celebrating in most of the previous sonnets. By making reproduction a matter of poetry rather than sex, Shakespeare takes the place of two members of the young man's future family: the son who will reproduce the young man and the wife who will be responsible for that reproduction" (Matz 480).
"In their own time all the sonnets were potentially scandalous. First, the sonnets to the young man did not simply reproduce the dominant social order. De Grazia emphasizes that the sonnets promote this status quo order by celebrating the fair—that is, aristocratic—young man. But this literary reproduction of the young man's beauty usurps the biological reproduction that the initial sonnets of the sequence contemplate—a point that de Grazia observes in a footnote, but does not pursue.9 In sonnet 18, the "eternal lines" that will preserve the young man past death are those of Shakespeare's sonnets. They recall—only to replace—the family line, the inheritance from father to son that Shakespeare has been celebrating in most of the previous sonnets. By making reproduction a matter of poetry rather than sex, Shakespeare takes the place of two members of the young man's future family: the son who will reproduce the young man and the wife who will be responsible for that reproduction" (Matz 480).
My Reaction
Time and the passing of the seasons (simulated in the sonnet) would seem terrifying to a being who will not have the opportunity to procreate. Shakespeare comforts his male "friend with benefits" by pointing out other things that will last in the place of a family line. That is a nice thought, but in reality, who will enjoy, or keep the sonnet in circulation, if there are none of the offspring the narrator seems to cast aside as a "lesser work." Art needs an audience to exist, after all. I would argue that raising children is an art unto itself.
Bibliography
