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 sometimes declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
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.
No collection of poems would be complete without some Shakespeare. His sonnets are always popular with "Let me not to the Marriage of True Minds" brought to public attention in the recent film of "Sense and Sensibility".
This sonnet is the poet seeking a way of describing his love’s beauty.
He attempts to compare her to a summer’s day but, in the end, concludes that the poem is the only way that she will be immortalised because summer will not last.
Clearly this is true, we are still reading about her long after her death. This poem can be used in a civil ceremony as, although "the eye of heaven" is mentioned it means the sun, not God.