“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…”
The narrator is comparing someone he knows intimately with the season of summer. To him, the most pleasant season is not as pleasant as this person who will last an eternity and will never die, because he/she will live forever in the lines of this sonnet.
Duration: 00:03:58 (about 4 minutes)
File Size: 2.91 MB
Download: Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare – MP3
Recording Copyright © 2006 Nikolle Doolin
Text of Sonnet 18:
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.
