Shakespeare Sonnet 18 Ring // Detailed argentium sterling silver flower ring // Love & immortality ring

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" This ring transforms Shakespeare's famous Sonnet 18 into physical form. All sizes are custom order.

This sonnet is tentative at first. In the previous sonnet, the poet has told us that he can't write the kind of poem that will really show us his beloved. In this poem, he tries to do what he said he can't do. Maybe he can try a simile? Is his beloved like "a summer's day"? Maybe--but summer has flaws, and it eventually ends.

So what is the beloved like? The speaker doesn't tell us, and instead he declares the impossible: the beloved lives in an "eternal summer" that will never go away.

This is romantic, but in addition to being impossible, it's almost apocalyptic. An eternal summer? What about the rest of us?

In the ring, the speaker's initial question becomes a delicate art nouveau-inspired floral motif curving around the sides of the ring. But then, from the center, the "eternal summer" explodes in a riot of flowers. The broken halves of the ring look like a broken egg, or an opening flower as well as an explosion. On the bottom of the ring, where only the wearer will see it, there is an eye: the place where the beloved will become immortal, "as long as eyes can see."

***
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 dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest 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.