Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

BY 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 untrimmed

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.”