Through the Lens of Love: Reframing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18
I’ve been experimenting with video lately — combining image, voice, rhythm, and mood. So I made a simple film of myself reading Sonnet 18. No music. No flair. Just words and breath.
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
It’s one of Shakespeare’s most quoted sonnets and one of his least thought about. Everyone knows the first line. Fewer people follow it to its conclusion — which is essentially an argument against time. Beauty fades, summer ends, but the poem itself refuses to. Art, Shakespeare is saying, holds what life cannot.
Photography makes the same claim. We press the shutter because we don’t want to let go.
I’m no literary scholar. But I’ve been married for over thirty years, and that gives you a particular relationship with the idea of love lasting. Virginie and I are not the same people we were in our twenties — and I’m grateful for that. What I felt then wasn’t what I feel now. It was the seed of it. Love doesn’t stay still. That’s its difficulty and its grace.
My son has just left home after his first real heartbreak. It was messy, as first loves tend to be. He’ll come through it — hopefully a little wiser, maybe a little gentler. My daughter still believes she knows exactly what love is. I hope I can guide her without crushing that certainty too soon.
In the North of England where I grew up, summer is short and unreliable. Shirtless Geordies drinking lager in May, ice cream vans doing brisk trade under grey skies — we know the value of warmth because we get so little of it. Here in the Vendée the summers are longer, but just as hard to hold on to. The light is different. Softer. Still slipping.
“By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d.”
Untrimmed sails. Love as a voyage. Not always calm water.
A photograph feels permanent. Look at it years later and the people in it have become slightly foreign — younger, in clothes they no longer own, with expressions they’ve since lost. Art doesn’t stop time. It echoes it.
We don’t photograph to freeze a moment. We photograph because we know it’s already leaving.
Shakespeare understood this. He didn’t name the beloved. We don’t know who the sonnet was written for. But we feel the love — and that’s the part that survives.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see — So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
IJM Photography 