Romantic Collection: Classic English Love Sonnets

Hello there.

I believe Saint Valentine’s Day is full of emotions, expectations, sometimes disappointments and if you are lucky even some kisses. Most young people want to be outside, where the action is. But there are plenty of classy ways to spend the day if you are not feeling to join the crowd. Why don’t we read and listen to some of the most popular sonnets written by William Shakespeare? You are invited to enjoy them in original language with us. William Shakespeare’s sonnets are written in English known as Early Modern English but it is not a problem, here’s a crib for you: thou — you (subject), thee — you (object), thy/thine — your, ye — you (plural form).

If you know interesting facts about sonnets, think of a question and send it to English Section, we might cope with it together.
Enjoy Saint Valentine’s Day! Enjoy learning English with poems!

Sonnet № 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments; love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his heighth be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

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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 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 wand’rest 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.

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