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.
In plain English
Should I call you as beautiful as a summer's day? Actually, you're even lovelier and more balanced than that. Summer brings rough winds that damage the May flowers, and the season itself is heartbreakingly short. The sun can be scorching one moment and hidden the next, and every beautiful thing — without exception — eventually fades, whether by accident or the simple wear of time.
But you won't fade like that. You'll keep your beauty forever, and death won't be able to claim you as its own. That's because these words I'm writing will make you immortal — as long as people exist to read them, you'll live on through the poem itself.
