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Sonnet 18

Publisher: LAH Publications

Catalogue Number: LAH 87

Year: 2025

For: SSATBB

Duration: 3:30

This is a really playful and fun setting of one of Shakespeare’s most well-known sonnets. When I was a kid, I used to enjoy memorizing poetry, and this is one of the poems I memorized…for fun. I’d had a musical idea for this sonnet jangling around in my head for about 5 years and am grateful to Dr. John Wiebe and the Augustana Choir for the opportunity to finally put pen to paper and set this text in 2025!  I think, musically, one could go in many directions with this particular sonnet, but to me, the opening lines an the idea of comparing someone to a summer’s day feels warm, lighthearted, happy, and full of delight and happiness. I tried to capture that feeling in the music, including a joyful ending that celebrates the freedom of love!

Commissioned by The Augustana Choir, Camrose, Alberta; Dr. John Wiebe, director.

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Text by William Shakespeare

 

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.