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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564, in Stratford-on-Avon. The son of...
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FURTHER READING
Poems for Summer
Tempest, Act V, Scene I [Where the bee sucks, there suck I]
by William Shakespeare
A Boy and His Dad
by Edgar Guest
A Green Crab's Shell
by Mark Doty
A Lesson for This Sunday
by Derek Walcott
A Path Between Houses
by Greg Rappleye
After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard
by Charles Wright
Aftermath
by Tony Connor
Alice at Seventeen: Like a Blind Child
by Darcy Cummings
Anastasia & Sandman
by Larry Levis
And You Thought You Were the Only One
by Mark Bibbins
Arms
by Richard Tayson
Back Yard
by Carl Sandburg
Bed in Summer
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Daffy Duck In Hollywood
by John Ashbery
Fat Southern Men in Summer Suits
by Liam Rector
Fishing on the Susquehanna in July
by Billy Collins
For Once, Then, Something
by Robert Frost
Ground Swell
by Mark Jarman
I see the boys of summer
by Dylan Thomas
I, Up they soar
by Inger Christensen
Idyll
by Siegfried Sassoon
If You Get There Before I Do
by Dick Allen
In Summer
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
In the Mountains on a Summer Day
by Li Po
Insect Life of Florida
by Lynda Hull
Jack
by Maxine Kumin
Jet
by Tony Hoagland
June Light
by Richard Wilbur
Let Birds
by Linda Gregg
Long Island Sound
by Emma Lazarus
Making the Bed
by Burt Kimmelman
Midsummer
by William Cullen Bryant
Mint
by Elaine Terranova
Miracles
by Walt Whitman
My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer
by Mark Strand
On 52nd Street
by Philip Levine
On Summer
by George Moses Horton
On the Grasshopper and the Cricket
by John Keats
Poem at Thirty
by Michael Ryan
Poem for Adlai Stevenson and Yellow Jackets
by David Young
Psychoanalysis: An Elegy
by Jack Spicer
Rhode Island
by William Meredith
Sally's Hair
by John Koethe
Solstice
by Ellen Dudley
Sonnet 7 [The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings]
by Petrarch
South
by Jack Gilbert
Summer
by Amy Lowell
Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina
by Jack Gilbert
Summer Holiday
by Robinson Jeffers
Summer Images
by John Clare
Summer in the South
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Summer Night, Riverside
by Sara Teasdale
Summer Past
by John Gray
Summer Song
by William Carlos Williams
Summer Stars
by Carl Sandburg
Summer X-Rays
by Nina Cassian
Swimming in the Presence of Lurid Opposition
by Sawako Nakayasu
The Abduction
by Stanley Kunitz
The Bargain
by Cyrus Cassells
The Family Photograph
by Vona Groarke
The Fishermen at Guasti Park
by Maurya Simon
The Fly
by William Blake
The Idea of Order at Key West
by Wallace Stevens
The Last Slow Days of Summer
by Phillip Lopate
The Philosopher in Florida
by C. Dale Young
The Summer House
by Tony Connor
The White Room
by Charles Simic
They'll spend the summer
by Joshua Beckman
This Lime Tree Bower My Prison
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Untitled [I know I am but summer to your heart]
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Vacation
by Rita Dove
Vertumnal [excerpt]
by Stephen Yenser
Vespers
by Louise Glück
Warm Summer Sun
by Mark Twain
Wildflower
by Stanley Plumly
Related Prose
Be Mine: Poems for Sweethearts
Poetic Form: Sonnet
Other Sonnets
A Certain Slant of Sunlight
by Ted Berrigan
Acquainted with the Night
by Robert Frost
American Sonnet (10)
by Wanda Coleman
American Sonnet (35)
by Wanda Coleman
Anthem for Doomed Youth
by Wilfred Owen
Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet
by Eavan Boland
Autumn
by Richard Garcia
Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
by William Wordsworth
Death, be not proud (Holy Sonnet 10)
by John Donne
Discourse
by Forrest Hamer
Half-Hearted Sonnet
by Kim Addonizio
History
by Robert Lowell
How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Mother Night
by James Weldon Johnson
My Letters! all dead paper... (Sonnet 28)
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130)
by William Shakespeare
Oil & Steel
by Henri Cole
Shawl
by Albert Goldbarth
Silence
by Thomas Hood
Sonnet
by Alice Dunbar-Nelson
Sonnet 1
by Gwendolyn Bennett
Sonnet 100
by Lord Brooke Fulke Greville
Sonnet 101 [Ways apt and new to sing of love I'd find]
by Petrarch
Sonnet 131 [I'd sing of Love in such a novel fashion]
by Petrarch
Sonnet 6
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Sonnet 8 [Set me where as the sun doth parch the green]
by Petrarch
Sonnet V
by Mahmoud Darwish
Sonnet [Nothing was ever what it claimed to be,]
by Karen Volkman
Sonnet—Silence
by Edgar Allan Poe
Testing Gardening
by Marie Ponsot
Today We Make the Poet's Words Our Own
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Untitled [You did say, need me less and I'll want you more]
by Marilyn Hacker
When I Consider How My Light Is Spent
by John Milton
Without Discussion
by Samuel Amadon
Related Pages
Animated Poems
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Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (Sonnet 18)  
by William Shakespeare

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 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 ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest 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.






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