Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
William Shakespeare
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 ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) was an English playwright and is one of the most widely-read writers in the English Language. With his works have been adapted countless times for the stage, television, film, and music, he’s left an unmatched, impressionable legacy on the Western literary canon.
