Students › Learn by heart

Memory work

Learn by heart

Sonnet 18 · William ShakespeareRead in the library ↗

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.

Exact wording of Sonnet 18 as hosted in the library. Public domain.

How to use it

  1. Read the whole passage aloud twice.
  2. Hide a few words, then say it all again, blanks included.
  3. Peek only when you are stuck. Keep going until every word is hidden.

Other passages

Or open any full-text work in the library, select up to about 400 words, and choose Memorize this passage. All memory work