Sonnet 18

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 owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st 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.

What is a sonnet?

The word “sonnet” meant simply “little song,” i.e., a short lyric poem- pre-Shakespeare. In Renaissance Italy and in Elizabethan England, the sonnet became a fixed poetic form, consisting of 14 lines.

The original form is the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, in which the 14 lines are arranged in an octet (8 lines) rhyming abba abba and a sestet (6 lines) rhyming either cdecde or cdcdcd.

The English or Shakespearean sonnet are made of three quatrains rhyming abab cdcd efef and a closing rhymed couplet.

Another form of sonnet is the Spenserian sonnet which is a variation developed by Edmund Spenser in which the quatrains are linked by their rhyme scheme: abab bcbc cdcd ee.

More on Shakespearen Sonnets