Thy eternal summer
Hampshire
When David was a boy, he was told that if he could cover 12 daisies in the lawn under his foot, summer had come.
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 dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
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.
Shakespeare, Sonnet XVIII
Is this why we write, in the hope we can give eternal life to a true love? And yet we know nothing of the person about whom Shakespeare writes - not his face nor his character nor even whether he was a man, though many aver he was. . .only that he or she was "lovely" and more beautiful than a summer's day. . .
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