Sonnet 55

Monuments come in many shapes and forms, and Shakespeare focuses on monuments in this poem to demonstrate their power and futility. Some monuments fall, and some stand forever. The monuments serve as physical representations of many things, including our memories, our loves, the things we worship, our egos, beauty, and records of moments in time. And just like all of these things, these monuments are subject to posterity, or the people, events, and things that come after those who make the monuments die. This is a scary thing because it demonstrates how little power and control we actually have over the memory of the things we value while we live.

Monuments are also ironic by their very nature because they tend to be structures intended to keep alive that which is dead. Kings and noblemen have built monuments to themselves for all of human history, all in an attempt to keep their names alive after death. Shakespeare’s monument to the fair youth is more enduring, though, perhaps because it is a monument intended for another instead of for himself.

Mars is the Roman god of war, an offshoot of the Greek god of war Aries. Shakespeare uses the symbol of Mars to both demonstrate