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 have all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of the 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 loose 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.
This poem by Shakespeare is about someone he loved, which I can tell because the line “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” is saying that the writer was thinking about this person as a summer’s day. The first and second stanzas discuss that the best weather and season aren’t infinite. The last stanza argues against the first two because the person he loves is better than a summer’s day: “But thy eternal summer shall not fade”. The couplet concludes the sonnet and says that the beauty of the person Shakespeare loved will live on and be remembered forever if people read this poem.
Like all Shakespearian sonnets, this poem has three stanzas of four lines and a couplet of two lines. It has fourteen lines of ten syllables and a first line introducing the poem. In the poem, repetition, assonance and alliteration are used. “So long” is used in lines thirteen and fourteen. “Shake” and “May” from line three share the “a” sound. In line five, “hot” and “heaven” both begin with the letter and sound “h”.