Hawthorn flowers near Swayfield in Lincolnshire.
Hawthorn blossom on a tree near Swayfield in Lincolnshire, photographed in May 2015. The common hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) is also known as the may tree.
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 ow’st;*
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:*
So long as men can breathe or eyes can
see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to
thee.*
William is not merely saying that his lover’s beauty is lovelier and less changeable than that of an English summer. He is saying that his verses give to her beauty a serenity and a life even beyond age and death, that is, beyond life’s autumn and winter.
That is, all beauty fades eventually, either through mishap or because that is how Nature is. In sailing, sails are ‘trimmed’ (adjusted) to maximise efficiency: similarly, Beauty loses efficiency over time, like a boat that is no longer sailing under full power. ‘Trim’ comes from an Old English word, trymman, meaning ‘make firm, arrange’.
‘That fair thou owest’ is the beauty (being fair of face) that she has borrowed from Time and would normally have to pay back. See The Seikilos Epitaph for a similar sentiment.
That is, Death cannot boast that she must eventually fall into his shadow (see Psalm 23:4) because she has been immortalised in verse, and with each passing year her beauty becomes known more widely, and so paradoxically grows.
William’s lover is made immortal in his verse, and while there are still men to read his lines, his poem (‘this’) will mean that she and her beauty never really die.
