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.
"Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines
And often is his gold complexion dimmed"- The hyperbole which Shakespeare uses everywhere including in this stanza was so typical of Elizabethan poetry but the beauty of the metaphors used remains un"dimmed" over time."The eye of heaven" and "his gold complexion" are lovely images.The comparison of the beloved to a summer's day -her moods compared with the hot and cold ,sunny and cloudy is a favourite image in the Renaissance poetry .