ONE of the great love poems, redolent of warmth and sunshine - and showing, moreover, that the writer has a fair conceit of himself!

What better to start a sequence for the run-up to St Valentine's Day?

SHAKESPEARE'S SONNET 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou are 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 to 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.