Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day- Point of View?

Question

Hey, Does anyone know for sure if the sonnet is about a man comparing his love to summer? Or is it a woman comparing the beauty of a man?

I heard that sonnets 1-17 were about a man trying to preserve his beauty, so i got confused

Answer 1

Whoops - looks like it was man-to-man, so to speak.

"The 'Fair Youth' is an unnamed young man to whom sonnets 1-126 are addressed. The poet writes of the young man in romantic and loving language, a fact which has led several commentators to suggest a homosexual relationship between them, while others read it as platonic love.

The first 17 sonnets are written to a young man, urging him to marry and have children, thereby passing down his beauty to the next generation. These are called the procreation sonnets
The earliest poems in the collection do not imply a close personal relationship; instead, they recommend the benefits of marriage and children. With the famous sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day") the tone changes dramatically towards romantic intimacy. Sonnet 20 explicitly laments that the young man is not a woman. Most of the subsequent sonnets describe the ups and downs of the relationship, culminating with an affair between the poet and the Dark Lady. The relationship seems to end when the Fair Youth succumbs to the Lady's charms."

Answer 2

No. Nobody knows for sure. Critics have debated this for the last couple of hundred years. It's a question of reading..........this particular sonnet is a great love poem but whether you think it is dedicated to a man or a woman is simply a matter of opinion.

The speaker in the poem is not merely comparing his love to a summer's day, he is comparing his own timeless love to the brevity of a summer's day. He ends the sonnet with the lines, "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.". By this the speaker of the poem is saying that as long as his poem is read, his lover will never die - he will be kept alive through the eyes of men who read the poem. The speakers love, unlike a summer's day, therefore outlives time itself. By his poem both his love for his lover and his lover's beauty are immortal.