Hot Weather and Shakespeare – an English tutor’s guide to metaphor

 "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd"

We love to talk about the weather in England but no one does it quite as well as Shakespeare!  These lines are from his sonnet "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day", and they show how he uses metaphor.

He is writing about the sun, but he calls it "the eye of heaven" and then talks about its "gold complexion" .  Obviously the sun is not an eye - it's a metaphorical and imaginative way of thinking about the sun - like a round eye looking down on us from the sky.

So you could write about it like this:

Shakespeare uses a metaphor to emphasise the power of the sun by using the metaphor of the "eye of heaven".  It's as if the sun is looking down with its heat on us.  But at other times it isn't warm enough, so Shakespeare uses another metaphor, of the "gold complexion" of sun which is often "dimm'd".  He makes us imagine how beautiful and valuable the sun is, but often we don't see its full glory.

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