"The Poet's Corner..."

Sonnet 18

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.

William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's Sonnets were first published in London, perhaps illicitly, by the publisher Thomas Thorpe. Among the greatest and well known and loved poems in the English language, most people do not realize that Shakespeare wrote these sonnets to "a fair youth." The 'Fair Youth' is an unnamed young man to whom sonnets 1-126 are addressed. Shakespeare clearly writes of the young man in romantic and loving language, a fact which serves to confirm a homosexual relationship between them. The more prudish and near-sighted prefer to call it "platonic. " But it is quite clear that he addresses a man and once read, "platonic" ; seems a ridiculous attempt at denying the obvious. This poem, taught to us as a poem of heterosexual love, is in fact written between men, and is from Shakespeare to another man in a tone of clear romantic intimacy.