The poem
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Shakespeare's Sonnets, published in 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 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.
About the author
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English playwright and poet, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language. He wrote 154 sonnets, published together in 1609, alongside 39 plays including Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. Sonnet 18 is the most famous of the sonnets, part of the early sequence addressed to a young man scholars call the Fair Youth.
Themes
The poem's great theme is time: summer days fade, beauty withers, and even the sun's 'gold complexion' is dimmed. Against time's destruction Shakespeare sets the permanence of poetry itself. The final couplet promises that as long as people breathe and see, the poem will live, and with it the young man's beauty.
Reading note
Read it aloud and notice how the argument turns: twelve lines of problems (time, decay, chance), then a two-line solution. The volta, or turn, arrives at 'But thy eternal summer shall not fade'. That pivot from complaint to promise is the engine of the sonnet form.