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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 John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, he was probably educated at the King Edward IV Grammar School in Stratford, where...
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FURTHER READING
Poems for Summer
Alice at Seventeen: Like a Blind Child
by Darcy Cummings
Bed in Summer
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Fat Southern Men in Summer Suits
by Liam Rector
Fishing on the Susquehanna in July
by Billy Collins
Summer Holiday
by Robinson Jeffers
They'll spend the summer
by Joshua Beckman
Related Prose
Be Mine: Poems for Valentines
Poetic Form: Sonnet
Other Sonnets
A Certain Slant of Sunlight
by Ted Berrigan
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
Death, be not proud (Holy Sonnet 10)
by John Donne
Discourse
by Forrest Hamer
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 1
by Gwendolyn Bennett
Sonnet 100
by Lord Brooke Fulke Greville
Sonnet 131
by Petrarch
Sonnet 6
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Sonnet [Nothing was ever what it claimed to be,]
by Karen Volkman
When I Consider How My Light Is Spent
by John Milton
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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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