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 dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest 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.
And now I've added another copy of this sonnet to cyberspace. Some of the "copies" I found are there as part of collections of favorite poems, some are examples of love poems available from "valentine" sites, some are part of college literature courses, and at least one is inside the complete works of Shakespeare. A couple are hyperlinked to explanations of the text. Most just sit there. There might be some logic in one "central" copy of the text that everyone could link to, but that raises questions for a different, perhaps future, column.
And your homework assignment, dear reader?
After reading the sonnet, click to the picture.
Compare the two.
How is Shakespeare's love similar to the painted summer day?
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