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.

- William Shakespeare

Shakespeare opens the poem with a question addressed to the sonnet’s recipient: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?" and the rest of the sonnet is concerned with the comparison between summer and the beloved.

Shakespeare uses weather and the characteristics of the summer season to illustrate the point of the sonnet. Generally, he talks of the fickle nature of summer. A summer’s day can be perfect, but sometimes a summer’s day can experience certain extremes. Shakespeare uses the examples of "rough winds", and the sun being either too hot or too hidden behind the clouds to highlight the intemperate manner of the season.

After Shakespeare establishes those characteristics of summer, he then devotes his time to differentiating the beloved from the summer’s day. This enables him to illustrate that although summer is beautiful at some points, the beloved has an unchanging and everlasting beauty, and is in fact more beautiful than a perfect summer’s day – "Thou art more lovely and more temperate:"

When Shakespeare refers to summer as the "eye of heaven" with its "gold complexion", he has personified summer. This means that he has given summer and its weather human characteristics, which makes it easier to draw comparisons between the season and the beloved.

After all the comparisons, Shakespeare’s point is clear. The beloved has an everlasting beauty and becomes an "eternal summer", which will never fade because it is forever embodied in the sonnet – "So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."

Shakespeare has used a comparison with the season’s weather in creating a simplicity and loveliness in its praise of the recipient, and this is most certainly a part of why the sonnet is the most famous of all Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Related Links:

- King Lear
- Macbeth
- Sonnet 18