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Sonnet 18 Read Closely: What the Volta Does

Sonnet 18 Read Closely: What the Volta Does

The most quoted love poem in English is usually quoted for its first two lines, which are the weakest in it. The poem's real subject is not the beloved's beauty but the poem's own ability to keep it — and the turn at line 9 is where that becomes explicit.

Form
Reading note
Lines
6
Metre
Shakespeare, Sonnet 18, 1609; quoted lines are public domain
Date
By The Verse Desk

Quoted: opening quatrain and closing couplet (public domain)

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:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The opening question is a trap the poem sets for itself

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? is a rhetorical question, and the second line answers it — no. Not temperate, better. But the answer is also the problem: if the comparison fails because summer is too short and too rough, then the beloved is also subject to time, and the next ten lines have to deal with that.

Notice that line 4, summer's lease hath all too short a date, is a legal metaphor inside a poem about beauty. Lease and date are property terms. The poem has already told you what it is going to be about: not beauty, but duration and ownership.

Line 9 is where the subject changes from her to the poem

The volta arrives at But thy eternal summer shall not fade. Everything before that line has been about the beloved and time. Everything after it is about the poem. The beloved's eternal summer is not a property of the beloved; it is a property of the sentence you are reading, and the poem knows it.

This is the move that makes Sonnet 18 more interesting than a compliment. It converts a claim about a person into a claim about a text, and then has to defend the text: as long as there are readers. The last two lines are not a flourish, they are the argument's actual conclusion.

The couplet sets a condition on the poem's own survival

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see. The condition is not whether the poem is good but whether people still read. That is an unusually honest clause to find at the end of a boast, and it makes the boast falsifiable — a rare thing in a love poem, and the main reason this one still gets taught.

Compare the couplet with line 12, When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st. Lines here means both verse and the lines on a face. The double sense is doing the work of the whole poem in one word: to be preserved in verse is also to age in a body. The poem does not resolve that double bind; it just names it.

Reading method

Read the octave and sestet as two separate poems and ask what each claims. Then read the couplet on its own and ask who is speaking to whom. Perform the turn out loud, with the word But held longer than the metre wants — the volta is a hinge, and hinges are heard, not seen.

Terms used in this entry
volta转折
The turn in an argument; in Sonnet 18 it arrives with the word But at line 9.
quatrain四行组
A four-line stanza; the poem is three of them plus a couplet.
close reading细读
Paying attention to the exact words and their order before asking what the poem is about.
double sense双义
One word carrying two meanings at once, both of which the argument needs.
public domain公有领域
Works whose copyright has expired, so they may be quoted freely.

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