Comparison of Shall I Compare Thee? and My Mistress' Eyes are

1 Shall compare thee to a summer's day?

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Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of maie,

And summers lease hath all to short a date:

5 Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,

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And often is his gold complexion dim'd,

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And every faire from faire sometime declines,

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By chance, or natures changing course untrim'd:

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But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

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10 Nor loose possession of that faire thou ow'st,

Nor shall death brag thou wandr'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,

So long as men can breath or eyes can see,

So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

In this sonnet, Shakespeare is creating a mental picture of spring and

summer to compare against his loved one.

He uses the fact that fine and beautiful days are the creation of

nature, and nature is constantly changing all the time. Fine days

never stay the same: 'rough winds' or the sun obscured by clouds, 'and

often is his gold complexion dim'd', can easily mar a fine day.

He talks about these negative factors of change in the first eight

lines, and Shakespeare then uses these ideas to claim that his loved

one will always remain untarnished, speaking of how 'thy eternal

summer shall not fade' and how his loved one has lasting qualities

that will outshine death:

'Nor shall death brag thou wandr'st in his shade'

These thoughts come to a confident, final...

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Compared to the first few lines in the second sonnet:

"My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun

coral is far more red than her lips red"

And this shocking feeling of offense and harshness continues through

to line twelve in the second sonnet. However, there are some dark

points in the first sonnet as well, as death is mentioned in line

eleven

"Nor shall death brag thou wandr'st in his shade"

And "rough winds" in line three. However, how harsh and sincere these

sonnets may be, both have the conclusions with the similar idea that

Shakespeare loves his woman so much that he doesn't need to give her

false comparisons to do with beautiful items or beautiful things that

don't last forever - his love lasts for eternity in the sonnet:

"So long as men can breath, and eyes can see

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."