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: Sometimes 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 owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest:— So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. WHEN in the chronicle of wasted time I see descriptions of the fairest wights, And beauty making beautiful old rhyme In praise of ladies dead, and lovely knights; Then in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, I see their antique pen would have exprest Ev’n such a beauty as you master now, So all their praises are but prophecies Of this our time, all, you prefiguring; And for they looked but with divining eyes, They had not skill enough your worth to sing: For we, which now behold these present days, Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise. THAT time of year thou may’st in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang: In me thou see’st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest: In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the death-bed whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourished by: This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long. HOW like a winter hath my absence been From thee the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen, What old December’s bareness everywhere! And yet this time removed was summer’s time: The teeming autumn, big with rich increase, Bearing the wanton burden of the prime Like widowed wombs after their lord’s decease: Yet this abundant issue seemed to me But hope of orphans, and unfathered fruit; For summer and his pleasures wait on thee, And, thou away, the very birds are mute; Or if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer, That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.