1. INSTITUTO GUATEMALTECO AMERICANO
Departamento de Cursos
British Literature
Javier Eduardo Aguirre, B.A.
Fourth Trimester, 2010
Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer ' s Day ?
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 date1.
Sometime too hot they eye of heaven shines,
And often is his complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed3.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair2 thou ow'st4,
Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest5 in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st6.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
A sonnet is a poem consisting of fourteen lines, usually written in iambic pentameter and
dealing with a single idea or emotion. The Shakespearean sonnet is composed of three quatrains
and a couplet. The rhyme scheme is generally abab cdcd efef gg.
A foot is a combination of accented and unaccented syllables which make up a metrical unit. A
foot may incorporate syllables from different words, and the foot divisions may cut across
words. The iambic foot consists of one unaccented syllable followed by one accented syllable
and it is the most widely used in English poetry.
Meter is the pattern of rhythm determined by the accented and unaccented syllables in a line of
poetry.
It is established by the repetition of a dominant foot. Therefore, the iambic pentameter, is a line
of verse consisting of five iambs.
Shall I / compare / thee to / a Sum / mer's day ?
_____________________________________________________________________________
___
1. date: term, period 3. untrimmed : reduced 5. grow'st : grow
2. fair : beauty 4. ow'st : own, possess 6. wander'st : wander