19 pages • 38 minutes read
William ShakespeareSonnet 55
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1609A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Monuments
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
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 the power of time and war while also showing the power of the poem. Because Mars, who is the cause of war, can bring about fire and destruction that will destroy all other monuments, it is more impressive that Mars will not be the destroyer of this monument—the poem. Shakespeare uses a little irony in the lines about Mars, giving the god a sword that brings about fire, yet he says that this fire will not burn the record of the poem’s subject. This is ironic because, of course, the poem was first written on paper—something much more susceptible to burning than stone or metal. And yet, it is the record of the subject that will survive the fire because it is already living and because words do not need to exist in one place. While physical monuments are still and lifeless, the poem is always active and alive.
The Judgement
The poem ends with the powerful image of the poem surviving until the fair youth awakens once more during the final judgment. This is a reference to the Christian apocalypse and the judgment of all before Christ. This sort of power that Shakespeare gives to the poem makes it feel similar to the story of Christ in the Bible. Just as Christ, whose story lives by way of the Bible, is dead and will return at the end of time, so too is the fair youth dead until the end of time but alive through the written record of him. In this way, Shakespeare is able to deify his subject, showing even more love and appreciation for him.
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By William Shakespeare
