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Sonnet · Love

Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

by William Shakespeare · 1609

1Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

2Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

3Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

4And summer's lease hath all too short a date;

5Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

6And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

7And every fair from fair sometime declines,

8By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;

9But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

10Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;

11Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

12When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:

13So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

14So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

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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).
The poem’s silhouette — approximate syllables per line, measured from the text above. Even bars mean a measured line; ragged bars mean the poem sets its own widths.

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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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