Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
1609

Cold Library · Open Stacks · S-004001 · https://coldlibrary.com/s/004001
Rights: Published in 1609 (Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Thomas Thorpe); the author died in 1616. Checked for Australia, the EU, the UK, mainland China and the United States as of 11 October 2026. Guidance, not legal advice.
Source: Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1041/pg1041.txt (retrieved 2026-10-11)
Generated 2026-10-14 from https://coldlibrary.com/en/open-stacks/shakespeare-sonnet-18

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