Sonnet 18

William Shakespeare(1564–1616)

Sonnets, 1609

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 fadeNor lose possession of that fair thou owest;Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st 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.

From Shakespeare's Sonnets (1883 edition), taken from the facsimile transcribed on English Wikisource. No emendation was made.

Public domainThis poem is in the public domain. You may read it, copy it, recite it and publish it without asking anyone.

About the poem

This is the best known of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets. It opens with a question — «Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?» — and at once refuses it: summer is too brief and uneven, the sun by turns too hot and clouded over; the beloved is more constant than it.

What saves that beauty is not nature but the poem. In the closing couplet, Shakespeare declares that so long as there are eyes to read these lines, the one he sings will live on in them: «So long lives this, and this gives life to thee». The sonnet becomes its own promise of immortality.