Shall I Compare Thee to a Summers Day? by William Shakespeare: A Poetry Analysis

poem:
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. 

analysis:

I discovered this poem on a dreary day in Grade Four. Scrolling through a book of poetry during silent reading, I read one of the most famous Shakespeare poems of all time; Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day? But, I haven't properly analyzed this sonnet until today.

This sonnet doesn't lend itself to much interpretation. It is, through and through, a tender, almost cornily written love letter. Although I do not know the backstory of this poem (if there is one), some lines make me believe that this poem was written after summer, because language like "And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.", makes the speaker feel like he's longing for summer days of old. But other than that, Sonnet 18 is simply a fluidly written enjoyable love poem that truly exemplifies the writing style of the time.

Although I have never been in a relationship before, I can still connect to this poem. I connect to the reader's desire for a woman to love him back, and it serves as an inspiration for my writing. However, I feel like the William Shakespeare's writing shouldn't be used as a model to build modern work on. His work serves as a relic of a time long gone. And that should not be perceived as a bad thing. The fact that his writing is so representative of the era of which it was written in is beautiful.