Sonnet 55

“Sonnet 55” (1609) is an English love sonnet by renowned poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616). The sonnet is part of Shakespeare’s Fair Youth sonnet sequence, which makes up the first 126 of his sonnets. This sonnet follows a number of the Fair Youth sonnets in the way it praises the fair youth’s beauty and claims his beauty is eternal. In this sonnet specifically, Shakespeare claims that the subject’s beauty will outlive all monuments of princes and will live even after the destruction time will bring to the world in the form of war and death. The poem argues that its own existence gives life to the subject, and the poem, by lasting through war and destruction, is the most powerful monument one can erect. However, the poem concludes with the idea that at the end of time, the return of Christ will lead to the resurrection of the fair youth, and that will be when the poem’s utility ends. This is one of Shakespeare’s most popular sonnets, though not as well-known as the thematically similar Sonnet 18.

Poet Biography

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in England. While Shakespeare lived centuries ago, there is quite a bit known about his adult life, including his business dealings; however, much of his childhood is shrouded in mystery. Historians do know that Shakespeare was raised in an affluent household and that he received the formal and comprehensive education common for upper-class boys of his time.

Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in 1582 and eventually moved to London, where he began his writing and acting career at some point during the 1580s or early 1590s. Shakespeare’s career took off in London, and he became the key player in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a play company that was popular in London at the time. Shakespeare’s company was so successful that it built its own theater, the Globe, in 1599.

Shakespeare’s company eventually became The King’s Men, the official play company of King James. In this role, Shakespeare wrote numerous plays and became rich.

Shakespeare was a prodigious writer, finishing 39 plays and 154 sonnets in his lifetime. Among these plays, Shakespeare wrote some of the most enduring tragedies, comedies, and histories to ever grace the stage, including Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Henry V. While he was popular in his day, his status as the most important English writer in history took a few centuries to develop.

While much is not known about Shakespeare the man, his plays and sonnets are some of the most famous literary works in the world, and they have been the subject of considerable scholarly focus over the past 400 years.

Shakespeare died in 1616.

Poem Text

Not marble nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,

But you shall shine more bright in these contents

Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.

When wasteful war shall statues overturn,

And broils root out the work of masonry,

Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn

The living record of your memory.

’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity

Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room

Even in the eyes of all posterity

That wear this world out to the ending doom.

     So, till the Judgement that yourself arise,

     You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 55.” 1609. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The first quatrain establishes the two opposing forces of the sonnet: the poem’s subject (the fair youth) and time. The poem opens with the declaration that no princely monument of stone will outlive the life of this poem. Shakespeare writes that the fair youth will shine brighter in the poem than he ever could on a gravestone that will inevitably become damaged by time.

The second quatrain discusses the effects of war, and Shakespeare notes that war will not destroy the memory of the fair youth because the poem memorializes it. While war may lay waste to statues and monuments, and all the work of masons that create them will be lost, war’s causes and war’s effects will not destroy the record of the fair youth’s memory.

The third quatrain then argues that the fair youth’s memory will outlive death, which is usually the thing that erases people from the world. Shakespeare claims that all those who come in the future until the end of time will remember the fair youth and the praise given to him.

In the couplet at the end of the poem, Shakespeare says that even when the fair youth dies, he will live on until he is risen on Judgement Day, and that is because he exists in this poem, which lives in lovers’ eyes.