“Shall I compare thee?”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

Sonnet XVIII.

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 dimmed:

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 owest;

Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest 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.