“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.”
What’s it about?
There’s a debate about whether Shakespeare wrote this beautiful poem about a real person – and, if so, whether it was addressed to a woman or a man – or whether it’s about an imaginary relationship. Whoever the beloved was, the poet tells him or her that they’re even lovelier than a summer’s day. The summer can be too windy, too short, too hot, too cool... but his lover is perfect. Summer inevitably comes to an end, but his beloved will exist forever in the lines of this poem. A clever trick by the poet to give his lover eternal life!
Good to know
Shakespeare wrote more than 150 poems in this sonnet form. They all have the same structure: 14 lines of ten syllables. The last two lines rhyme and give the final fanfare to the poem.
Sonnet 18 in modern English
Shall I compare you to a summer’s day?
You’re lovelier and milder than the summer, because
Strong winds sometimes shake the little flowers in May,
And the season of summer is too short.
Sometimes the sun shines too much and it’s too hot.
At other times, the golden face of the sun doesn’t shine at all.
All beautiful things eventually become less beautiful.
They lose their prettiness through bad luck or natural changes.
But your eternal summer will never end.
Your summer will never lose the beauty that you possess.
Death cannot boast that you walk in his shadow, because
You will continue to grow through time in the eternal lines of poetry. As long as people exist and have eyes to read,
Then this poem will live, too, and this poem will give you eternal life.
Info to go
“Thou” and “thee” are archaic and poetic English forms of the singular “you” (du and dich/dir). “Thy” and “thine” are equivalents of the singular possessive “your” (dein). “Art” and “hath” are archaic forms of “are” and “has”.