The aim of this blog is to serve as a meeting point to those who study or have studied English philology and, more broadly, to all those who love literature and language.

8 Sept 2008

Poems: Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18"

I'd been browsing through the English literature course books searching for a poem in order to start in that way a series of favourite poems that could appear interwoven among the rest of posts in this blog. I start with Shakespeare's 'Sonnet 18', a poem I remember writing about in my first exam of LITERATURA INGLESA I.

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.

One of the many recordings that can be found on the WWW:



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2 comments:

  1. And every fair from fair sometime declines,
    — and then she becomes FEA.

    This week I start a course on Shakespeare, including his sonnets. Nice to see this one here.

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  2. Oops, I'm not Alvaro, I'm JoseAngel. Blame them Google people.

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