Student Question
How does Howard Moss's poem "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?" compare to Shakespeare's writing?
Quick answer:
Howard Moss's poem "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?" parodies Shakespeare's sonnet by the same title, using modern slang and simplistic language to humorously reduce the original's grandeur. Moss's lines lack the vivid imagery and poetic techniques, such as personification and metaphor, found in Shakespeare's work. While both poems assert that poetry grants a form of eternal life, Moss's version uses a more mundane tone.
Howard Moss's "Shall I Compare Thee To a Summer's Day?" is a parody of Shakespeare's sonnet by the same title, and Moss deliberately reduces the ideas and the language to something commonplace in an attempt to be humorous. Let's compare the two poems.
Moss's poem is written in simple language, sprinkled with modern slang. It is meant to be a “translation” of sorts of Shakespeare's poetic ideas to modern American English, and it is deliberately simplistic. It lacks the grandeur and the vivid imagery of Shakespeare's original and its descriptions are intentionally much more dull.
Let's look, for instance, at Moss's line, “Even in May, the weather can be gray.” This is true, of course, but it is not especially creative. It does not give us a vivid mental image like Shakespeare's “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.” Here we have a picture of delicate trees...
Unlock This Answer Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
shaking in the wind, threatened by the rough weather. The image is not the same.
We can look at the lines about the sun as another good example. Moss merely says, “Sometimes the sun's too hot; / Sometimes it is not.” Compare this to Shakespeare” “Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, / And often is his gold complexion dimmed ...” Shakespeare uses a metaphor and personification to describe the sun in a highly poetic move that presses us to see the common sun as something extraordinary, even almost human.
According to Shakespeare, death too can be personified. It cannot brag when it finally captures the speaker's beloved, for the poem will provide a kind of eternal life through its lines. Death will suffer a defeat. This is a much more meaningful and beautiful idea than people breaking their necks and dropping dead in Moss's version.
The last two lines of both poems assert that poetry makes people live on in some way, but again, Shakespeare says it with a more conventionally poetic tone. Moss's simplistic rhymes and cliche parody the message in Shakespeare's writing by pointing out the dramatic visuals by representing them with more common language.