A.k.a. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
John’s related banter…
So today, we’re going to look at the history and the controversy surrounding Shakespeare’s sonnets. And we’ll look at three particular sonnets. They’re often known by their first line, but they’re also known by numbers, so we’re gonna look at sonnet 18 AKA “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”, Sonnet 116: “Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds Admit Impediment”, and sonnet 130: “My Mistress’s Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun.”
crashcourse | Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Crash Course Literature 304)
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
(Unquoted remainder)
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.
John Green Reads Poetry 