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
—“Sonnet 18,”
William Shakespeare
What is the central idea of the first quatrain?
Like summer, romance is beautiful but short-lived.
Beautiful weather makes people fall in love.
The speaker’s beloved is more beautiful than a summer day.
Even rough winds cannot detract from the beauty of summer.
The central idea of the first quatrain is that the speaker's beloved is more beautiful and pleasant than a summer day.
To determine the central idea of the first quatrain of Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare, we should analyze the lines provided:
"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."
In these lines, the speaker is comparing their beloved to a summer's day. In the first line, the poetic device of a rhetorical question is used to express the speaker's hesitation in comparing their beloved to such a fleeting and transient object as a summer's day. However, the second line establishes that the beloved is "more lovely and more temperate" than a summer's day, indicating that their beauty surpasses that of the season. Furthermore, the third and fourth lines suggest that even though summer has its own appeal, it is not without its faults as it is subject to "rough winds" that shake the delicate buds of May, and it is also temporary in nature.
From this analysis, we can conclude that the central idea of the first quatrain is that the speaker's beloved surpasses the beauty and transience of a summer's day. Therefore, the correct answer is: The speaker’s beloved is more beautiful than a summer day.