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 has 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 sometimes 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.

We have come a long way from stylised exhortations to get married and procreate. The poem is a paean of praise for the young man which nevertheless holds onto the thread that the poet can give his beauty, which is necessarily transient, a sort of eternity. There is therefore a strong bond between the lover and the beloved, the poet and the aristocrat, cemented in and by poetry. Or at least, that is what the poet hopes. His trust is lavish, his disillusionment will be brutal.