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 oft’ 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 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.
Yeah? Which part exactly?
That’s what I would like to know. I was an English major and I was never under the impression that these sonnets were addressed to a man.
I never had a professor waste any time on that interpretation either.
As I understand it, if you read the first 126 sonnets all together it is clear that they are all referring to one person who is male.
I forget the name of the English historian whose theory is this sonnet in particular is addressed to Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, who died at the age of 11 a victim of the plague.