T is for thee

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” is the beginning of possibly the most beautiful love poem ever written, of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18.

Pity that there is no “Du” in English. The intimacy of “thou, thee, thine”, the “du, dich, dein” we have lost in English, is one of the things that makes German my language of love.

For those of you who were hoping that T is for test, here is a great test of Shakesperean pronouns.

Here’s David Gilmore of Pink Floyd interpreting 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 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.

– William Shakespeare

Thank you to Leslie of English Desk for this video.