sustained throughout the sonnet in solid Metaphysical (or "proto-Metaphysical") fashion.
The first quatrain is devoted to establishing the comparison between youth and beauty and summer:
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
Although Shakespeare begins by indulging in a bit of hyperbole, saying his young subject is "more lovely and more temperate" than a summer's day, he establishes that there are, nonetheless, genuine similarities. Like summer, youth and beauty are fragile and subject to the ravages of the elements ("Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May") and temporary ("And summer's lease hath all too short a date").
The second quatrain concerns the fluctuating, everyday (rather than ideal), nature of summer--and, therefore, by extension, of beauty:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed
Although the standard notion of "summer" inspires visions of constant warmth and sunshine, Shakespeare points out in lines 4 and 5 that, in reality, summer is not always, invariably so lovely. Similarly, beauty is equally variable--just as summer is not an endless, predictable season of unvarying warmth and sunshine; it is spotted on occasion by days which are too hot or cloudy--beautiful people occasionally have days when, for whatever reason, they look less than their best: "And every fair from fair sometimes declines/By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed." Thus, even in their full flower, youth and beauty are
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