Having read some annoyingly trite prose somewhere, I came up with the above-quoted line as my Messenger tagline. After someone asked me where it was from (grrr!) I googled it to see if someone had used the line before.

It seemed no-one has, but this got me noticing that this is a classic snowclone structure. Got to checking that hypothesis and saw “shall I compare thee” -“summer’s day” gave me an impressive 189,000 results.
Most of those, though, are simply the original quote with the penultimate noun clause omitted.

Two optimizations followed, one excluding all pages with the word “shakespeare” in them, and the second adding the dandling “to” to the original phrase : “shall I compare thee to”, and with these we’re down to 75,500 hits with such gems as “Shall I compare thee to a bale of hay”, “…a carbuerator” and “…a summer’s sausage”.

Procrastination is a harsh mistress.