by William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
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Language: English
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 ow'st; 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.
J. Dankworth sets lines 1-8
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View text with all available footnotesText Authorship:
- by William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), no title, appears in Sonnets, no. 18 [author's text checked 1 time against a primary source]
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Research team for this page: Emily Ezust [Administrator] , Johann Winkler
This text was added to the website between May 1995 and September 2003.
Line count: 14
Word count: 118