Sonnet 18in modern English, side by side

One of the sonnets addressed to the beautiful young man. The speaker sets out to compare him to a summer's day, finds that summer falls short, and promises that the poem itself will keep his beauty alive forever.

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Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Should I compare you to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

You are more lovely and more gentle.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

Rough winds shake the delicate buds of May, and summer's lease runs out far too quickly.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,5

And often is his gold complexion dimm’d,

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:

Sometimes the eye of heaven — the sun — shines too hot, and often its golden face is dimmed by clouds; and everything beautiful eventually falls away from beauty, stripped by accident or by nature's changing course.

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,10

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,

But your eternal summer will never fade, or lose its hold on the beauty you own; and Death will never get to brag that you wander in his shadow, because in these eternal lines you grow into time itself.

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

As long as people can breathe and eyes can see, this poem will live — and this poem gives life to you.

Famous lines in this scene

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” line 1

The opening line of perhaps the most famous love poem in English. The speaker proposes a standard poetic comparison — beloved to summer — then spends the poem rejecting it: summer is too rough, too hot, too short. The question sets up the argument that the beloved outdoes nature itself.

“So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” line 13

The closing couplet delivers the poem's promise: as long as humans exist to read it, the poem survives — and by surviving, it keeps the beloved alive. It is Shakespeare's boldest claim for poetry's power over death, and history has proved it right: we are still reading it.

Confused by a different line? Paste any Shakespeare — any play, any edition — and get it in modern English.

Studying the language itself? Our Shakespearean English course teaches thou/thee, the verbs, and the meter — free through Unit 2. Or try the Shakespearean English translator.