Hummingbird Featured Poem.

Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

By William Shakespeare

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.

Curator's Note: Sonnet 18 is one of Shakespeare's most well known and loved poems. Its simplicity, its pure expression of love, and its message make it widely relatable. And of course, it is a near perfect execution of a proper English sonnet-- remember English class-- 14 lines of iambic pentameter, its rhyme pattern, and its transition to the surprise finish. We couldn't resist.