Shall I compare

Sonnet XVIII: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?

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,
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 ow'st;
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

"Shall I compare" is a sonnet composed of 14 lines and it is one of the most famous.

The title is repeated in the first line of the first quatrain.

In the first quatrain, the poet makes a comparison between his love, the fair youth, and the season of summer. Shakespeare alludes also to the darling flowers and to the rough winds of May, to describe his lover, and he addes that summer, in his idea, is too short.

In the second part, the poet says that sometimes the sun is too hot and the complexion of his lover is gold and so he tells him that he won't get on in years.

In the third quatrain Shakespeare tells to the fair youth that he won't die and he won't lose his beauty, even if he will become old.

Finally, in the couplet rhyme, the poet specifies that this won't happen, until people could breath and see.