A S0NNET BY SHAKESPEARE

 

                               

                                A S0NNET BY SHAKESPEARE

         

            The English poet-playwright William Shakespeare  (1564-1616 ) wrote 154 sonnets (poems comprising 14 lines each).

 

            Almost  all of them are love poems and celebrate the subjects of  beauty, time, mortality,  longing, pain, hope and despair.

           

            Some of them are about the eternal loveliness of  a ’Fair Youth’ and a mysterious woman  the “Dark Lady”.    

 

                The sonnet given below is about a “Fair Youth.” Its subject is his immortality,  as the poet says :

 

“Thy eternal summer shall not fade.

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade.  

 

                Here is the full text :

 

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 ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st 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.

                                                *******

G.R.Kanwal

24 May 2026