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


William Shakespeare declared that his sonnets will outlast such earthly things as stone monuments and inscriptions, stating thus:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this pow'rful rhyme,

If poems and rhymes can outlive them all, the more so with life's moments captured by the camera's eye.