English Poetry I: From Chaucer to Gray.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14. |
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| 108. Eighteenth Sonnet |
| | | William Shakespeare (1564–1616) |
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| 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, | 5 |
| 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; | 10 |
| 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. | |
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