Shakespeare’s Sonnet # 18, written over 400 years ago, is a miracle. Often quoted, it is regarded by many to be the quintessential love sonnet. Summer and the cycles of seasons are the grand metaphor here, with the Poet comparing his love to the beauty of a summer’s day. But, like a summer’s day, that beauty passes. The argument of this sonnet is sublimely simple: fear not, for your beauty, and my love for you, will be preserved in the lines of this verse.

Oftentimes this sonnet is read at weddings. What folks often forget or don’t even realize is that the Poet wrote this sonnet to another man. Extraordinary for something from the Elizabethan era. In the cycle of 154 Sonnets, this is the first turning point–where the Poet first admits he loves the Young Man. What a way to proclaim it!

What’s truly lovely about this sonnet, I think, is that it’s perfect for any wedding, heterosexual or otherwise, and for any era; wonderfully suited to any couple in love, regardless of their makeup, and a timeless expression of life, death and Art, evoking one of the most beautiful of human qualities–rapture for another human.

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.

Much thanks to my dear old mom, who let me record this in her back forty, on a late summer day.