Sonnet 55: Not Marble, Nor the Gilded Monuments

SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, Relived

With the supremely confident Sonnet 55, William Shakespeare returns to a theme he has handled similarly deftly before: the power of poetry itself to make the young man live forever. In a departure from previous instances, he here appears to borrow directly from Horace and Ovid, who are both Roman poets of the turn into the first millennium of the Common Era, striking a therefore more generic note, but unlike these classical precedents for verses that can outlast the supposedly durable substances of physical structures, he employs his poem once again not to celebrate himself but to praise his young lover.