Sonnet XVIII

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.

Sonnet LXXIII

That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. / In me thou see'st the twilight of such day / As after sunset fadeth in the west; / Which by and by black night doth take away, / Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. / In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire, / That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, / As the death-bed whereon it must expire / Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by. / This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Sonnet XCVII

How like a winter hath my absence been / From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! / What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen! / What old December's bareness every where! / And yet this time remov'd was summer's time; / The teeming autumn, big with rich increase, / Bearing the wanton burden of the prime, / Like widow'd wombs after their lords' decease: / Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me / But hope of orphans and unfather'd fruit; / For summer and his pleasures wait on thee, / And, thou away, the very birds are mute: / Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer, / That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.