Shall I compare thee to a sweltry day?
By Johann Sebastian Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a sweltry day?
Thou art more dismal and less temperate.
Long ago flow’red the darling buds of May
That now droop and wilt, green fuses past their date.
Sometime, benign the eye of heaven shines,
And mercifully his furnace round is dimmed;
And then the brutish in the brute declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But soon the grimness of the stare shall fade,
Out from the enervating face thou ow’st,
And death shall brag thou wand’rest in his shade
When to heedless unrelenting time thou bow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives death to thee.
Commentary
Sadly, or perhaps we should say enticingly, little is known about the lives of Johann Sebastian Shakespeare and William Shakespeare, including whether their last names are coincidental or indicative of a family connection. Will was from Stratford, toward the southwest of England, while Joe was from Durham, in the far northeast. Considering the limited migratory patterns of the sixteenth century, when both were born, a family connection is improbable. Moreover, while Will seems to have spent most of his adult life in London, there is no record of Joe having ever traveled that far south.
Nevertheless, there are remarkable similarities between Joe’s poem transcribed above and Will’s justly more famous Sonnet 18, copied below. The reader will note the nearly matching rhyme scheme, the common language elements and two lines (8 and 13) that are word-for-word identical.
Even more striking is the similarity in thematic structure: In both, a figure in the poet’s life is compared to a certain season; in both, the difference between that figure and the season is ascribed to duration; and in both, the poet asserts the power of his poem to extend the figure’s time, albeit in qualitatively different ways.
On the other hand, the poets’ attitudes toward their subjects are at opposite poles. In Will’s case, the sonnet declares that his beloved’s fairness is comparable to that of a glorious day. Even though such days are all too short, the poem will bestow on her/him eternal life. By contrast, Joe’s subject is likened to one of those miserable, muggy stretches in the depth of summer that drag on so slowly that they never seem to end. The poem comforts readers with the assurance that this, too, shall pass, and in doing so kills his subject dead. The beloved subject of Will’s poem will overcome fragility and live on through the poem, while the despised subject of Joe’s will endure only in the poet’s disdain.
It is intriguing to speculate which sonnet came first, and whether the author of the second consciously borrowed from the first. However, it is hardly out of the realm of possibility that the two Shakespeares independently came up with two such closely related sonnets. After all, the history of science is replete with examples of discoveries being made in different parts of the world at roughly the same time. More to the point, Jorge Luis Borges documented the case of the author who spontaneously wrote Don Quixote, without reference to Miguel de Cervantes’ earlier novel. (See Borges’ monograph “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.”)
Indeed, there is hardly any originality in the notion of a fleeting season or a season that feels never-ending. Nor does it suggest any particular originality to compare a season to a life, nor to articulate a desire that a moment last forever. That one poem grants eternal life and the other ensures eternal opprobrium merely confirms the commonplace nature of their themes.
Still, readers speculate which came first: the optimism or the pessimism, the elixir or the venom. Admittedly on no evidence whatsoever, this commentator contends that Joe’s pessimism came first and that Will’s glowing sonnet came later. The enduring fame of Will’s sonnet, by contrast with the obscurity of Joe’s, upholds my faith in the human spirit. It triumphs over Joe’s graceless—dare I say?—soggy negativity.
Is there any poem more famous in the English language than Will’s sonnet 18? Nevertheless, here goes:
Sonnet 18
By William Shakespeare
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 dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest 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.
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