April is ‘Poetry Month’.
Yesterday we studied William Shakespeare’s use of old English in Sonnet 18. We learned that a sonnet has 14 lines, and the two final lines rhyme. Today we begun developing ways to learn the poem. We will continue to work on learning this by heart over the next few weeks. Our aim is to perform this at our Summer Garden Party.
You’ll find the poem in both written and audio form below:
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 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 owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
