| William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. The Book of Elizabethan Verse. 1907. | | | | Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? | | By William Shakespeare (1564–1616) |
| | | 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 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; | 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. | | | | |
|
|
