Sonnet · Love
Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
by William Shakespeare · 1609
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.
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“Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?” by William Shakespeare — quilloak.com/poems/sonnet-18
Quick facts
- Poem
- Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
- Poet
- William Shakespeare
- Published
- 1609
- Length
- 14 lines
- Form
- Sonnet
- Themes
- Love, For Her
Craft notes
How this poem works
Measured from the text on this page, not copied from a summary. Counts are approximate: syllables and rhymes come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, which models General American English, so dialect, older pronunciation, and performance can all change what you hear.
- Shape
- 14 lines · one 14-line stanza
- Line length
- Mostly 10-syllable lines (pentameter length).
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Text, source & rights
A traceable edition
Full-text display is based on a United States term-expiry review; status can differ elsewhere.
- Author record
- William Shakespeare1564–1616
- Source record
- QuillOak curated editionSonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (1609) by william-shakespeare
- Display decision
- Full text · United States · reviewed 2026-07-18
- Publication record
- 1609
- Text fingerprint
- SHA-256 c76174616d1a9d1b…
- Editorial handling
- Whitespace and stanza breaks normalized for web display; no material wording change recorded.
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