Opulent and timeless words about love - Shakespeare's Sonnets
A sonnet is a particular type of short poem with 14 lines and typically ten syllables per line. This form of poetry is best associated with William Shakespeare who, as far as we know, wrote and published 154 of them although he may have written many more but they got lost or destroyed over time.
William Shakespeare’s Love Sonnets are lovely to have included in a wedding ceremony because they are not too long and most are easily understandable. You will not need a degree in English literature to appreciate them.
For example, in Sonnet 116 Shakespeare wrote: “Love alters not with… brief hours & weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom”.
One of his most famous extracts is from 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 a short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But they 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 gives life to thee.