Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
First published in Shake-speares Sonnets (London: Thomas Thorpe, 1609); text from Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. William J. Rolfe (Harper & Brothers, 1883).
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;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.