Howard Moss's satire of Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee"

¶ … 1609, Shakespeare's sonnet "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day" was published (Harmon 27). The sonnet has become one of the most well-known and often-read poems in English literature. It has influenced poets since like Howard Moss, who satirizes the Shakespeare poem with his own "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day." A long-time poetry editor for The New Yorker and winner of the National Book Award, Moss achieves much more than simply re-writing the Shakespeare sonnet into modern vernacular English. As tempting as it is to read the Moss version of the poem as a vulgar translation of Shakespearean dialect, Moss's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day" provides layer upon layer of satire and irony, making it a quintessentially postmodern poem.

The source material, Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day" has been, like Moss's poem, misunderstood as being a pure celebration of a woman's beauty. As Harmon points out, Shakespeare was cleverly "playing with some ... tricks," and "saying outlandish things" to show how many of his contemporary sonnet writers had fallen prey to "mindless cliche," (27). Therefore, Shakespeare was already providing the sort of meta-narrative text that Moss does, centuries prior to the postmodern era.

With his 20th century version of "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day," Moss continues Shakespeare's tradition of using poetry to convey social commentary that requires deep intertextual reading. Moss imbues his verse with irony, while also satirizing the original material of Shakespeare. Just as Shakespeare urges a break from literary conventions that had become cliche, Moss also breaks from tradition by refraining from placing his poem into any recognizable structure while also making fun of free verse itself. A true 20th century free verse poem, "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day" comes across as being trite and simplistic, especially if it were read without any prior knowledge of the Shakespearean text. If Shakespeare was suggesting that sonnet writers had become lazy and prone to cliche, Moss was suggesting that free verse writers had also become lazy and complacent. Moss deliberately copies the Shakespeare text almost line for line, too, as if to show that many modern poets have become unoriginal. For example, Moss substitutes the first line of the Shakespeare poem with "Who says you're like one of the dog days?" with "dog days" being a slang term for summer. Similarly, Shakespeare had used symbolism of an "eternal summer" to speak about the triumph over physical death. Moss writes, "Who can stay young forever? / People break their necks or just drop dead!"