Sonnet 18 “Shall I Compare Thee to a…”

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.