Buds are the suggestions of beauty waiting to burst forth as flowers.
I read this as a reflection on mortality as the ‘rough winds’ of May shaking the ‘darling buds’ represents the tempestuous spring, which in turn could represent a period where a woman’s beauty and attitude are being refined. I’ll mention two interpretations for lines three to six. However, his love is ‘more lovely’ and ‘more temperature’ meaning that her beauty and her personality/attitude are even more impressive than the summer’s. Suggesting summer as being similar should immediately make you think of connotations such as warm, joyful, bright and beautiful. A rhetorical question opens the sonnet, questioning whether the summer is fair enough to be compared to the poetic voice’s love.
