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.

The speaker then states that the Fair Youth will live forever in the lines of the poem, as long as it can be read.

[5] The couplet's first line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter rhythm: The poem is part of the Fair Youth sequence (which comprises sonnets 1–126 in the accepted numbering stemming from the first edition in 1609).

The second meaning of "complexion" would communicate that the beloved's inner, cheerful, and temperate disposition is constant, unlike the sun, which may be blotted out on a cloudy day.

[4] "Ow'st" in line ten can carry two meanings, each common at the time: "ownest" and "owest".

[8] Other scholars have pointed out that this borrowing and lending theme within the poem is true of both nature and humanity.