Summer's Day (Sonnet 18)
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 untrimm'd; But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor 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.
Of note
When John Benson republished Shakespeare's sonnets in 1640, this was one of the few he left out. It drew little notice until Victorian anthologists, led by Francis Palgrave, took it up. Palgrave gave it the title "To His Love."
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TEXT PROVENANCE · First published 1609 in Shake-speares Sonnets · Text from William J. Rolfe’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1883), via Wikisource.
Shakespeare's Sonnets, William J. Rolfe edition (1883)
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