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Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?
by William Shakespeare

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 wand'rest 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.

One of the best of Shakespeare's sonnets. Not very many people talk about the collection of sonnets as a single grand work. It tells a story. I like the story. Do you think it shows that Shakespeare was in love with a young man or with a young woman?

Nathrad Sheare wrote:One of the best of Shakespeare's sonnets. Not very many people talk about the collection of sonnets as a single grand work. It tells a story. I like the story. Do you think it shows that Shakespeare was in love with a young man or with a young woman?

That's very interesting, and you're right, I haven't heard of the sonnets talked about as a single work before. I will have to reread them and find out more about this story.

I've heard that there are two phases to the sonnets. One has him writing to a "Dark Lady", while the other involves a young man. I think this poem is part of the set devoted to the man, though since I haven't read all of them, I can't speak with absolute certainty.

I noticed, myself, that Shakespeare makes a strange transition from speaking to a young man to speaking to a young woman. The change happens in a great show of cleverness on the bard's part. He does a great job at making a reader wonder what his intentions really were.

A_Velarde23 wrote:Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?
by William Shakespeare


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

I just like these last two lines.
The sound and rhythm of it is great.