"Shall I Compare the to a Summer's Day" Questions

• Based on this poem, the speaker feels great admiration for the person for the person he is referring to; however, he cannot love her for she is not eternal.

• The poem is not talking about a summer’s day at all. The “summer’s day” that is being references is actually a woman and they are having a sort of fling, instead of a relationship.

• Specific points comparing the recipient and a summer's day include “hot”, “temperate”, “lovely”, “fair” and “the eye of heaven’s shines.” Each of these is about the beauty of a woman. Another references to a woman is “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May” which references a woman’s bosom during intercourse.

• The poem is a love poem for a summer fling. The speaker wants to receive sex from this woman and is stating that she’s beautiful, perfect, but he cannot love her because her love can only be attained from the summer seasons.

• The recipient’s beauty makes her perfection to the writer.

• The speaker could be either male or female because there is not specific information within the poem. The recipient is a woman because he references her breasts through “the darling buds of May.”

• The poem can be broken into two parts. Part one is where he is bragging on her beauty and lasts until the stanza beginning in “But.” Part two is the rest of the poem, explaining why he can only be with her for a short while.

• If the reader were to just read the beginning, it would seem as if it were just a mad love poem, that a man wrote to get a woman to bed. The shift at line 9 adds an important detail to the poem. The author references a change that comes with the end of summer gives then eternal time. This show the end of the summer romance. The author and the recipient are parting ways and he wants to “go out with a bang” so to speak.