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.
William Shakespeare · Shakespeare's Sonnets
Love & longing
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
- Author
- William Shakespeare
- Work
- Shakespeare's Sonnets
- Year
- 1609
- Chapter / part
- Sonnet XVIII
- Length
- 114 words
- Source
- Project Gutenberg eBook #1041
Public domain. This passage is in the public domain. William Shakespeare died in 1616, more than 70 years ago, and the work was first published in 1609. You can copy, print, read aloud or sell it without asking permission; a credit is kind but not required. The text is copied word for word from the Project Gutenberg edition linked here.
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How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.I love thee to the depth and breadth and heightMy soul can reach, when feeling out of sightFor the ends of Being and ideal Grace.I love thee to the level of everyday’sMost quiet need, by sun and candlelight.I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.I love thee with the passion put to useIn my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.I love thee with a love I seemed to loseWith my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,I shall but love thee better after death.
Elizabeth Barrett BrowningSonnets from the Portuguese, 1850 · Sonnet XLIII
Passage page · Read the full text
Passage page · Read the full text
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
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