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.
-- William Shakespeare
A discussion here.
2 comments:
I think Shakespeare thought a lot about youth. This sonnet was written the same year he started the initial draft for Hamlet. A lot of the main characters in Hamlet were youth. Don't forget about Romeo and Juliet, too, which was written a few years earlier. We all know that story is about young lovers!
I thought Shakespeare was commissioned to write this poem (as he was many poems)... but, maybe I'm remembering wrong. I don't know! Now it's going to bother me and I'm going to have to go read up on it... crap.
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