Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this pow'rful 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 Mar's his fire 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 judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.
– William Shakespeare
Given Shakespeare's long-time status as a world-wide cultural monument, & the widespread use of the English language as, if not a first, then a nearly universal second language, & the fame of this particular sonnet, it's easy for us to miss how breathtakingly arrogant & even delusional it is.
England at the time was, of course, even smaller than it is today, as Scotland was still a separate country & the Irish were barely under British control. Located on the edge of the Eurasian landmass, cut off by the sea from the rest of Europe, under constant threat from the superior strength of Catholic Spain & France, centuries behind the intellectual & cultural developments of a hotspot like the Italian city-states, not so far away in time from a series of bloody internal wars over succession & facing more of the same as their aging Queen (resplendent though she was) was clearly going to die without producing an heir, emerging from a series of back-&-forth switches between Catholic & Protestant religions, with a growing minority of Dissenters & Puritans, speakers of a language generally unknown outside the realm . . . . England was at this time a marginal & chaotic place, & English literature was pretty much being invented at this time. So for a poet to claim that his rhyme (in a form borrowed from the more sophisticated literature of Italy) would last through Judgment Day is, even for a poet, audacious.
The idea that poets grant eternal fame through their verse is rooted in the classical tradition, but, as noted above, England was not exactly the center of the classical revival. Yet Shakespeare does not acknowledge the marginal status of his language or his country: he simply claims the territory, with an assurance & magnificence that have helped to make his prophecy come true. And he saw clearly not only the power of officially acknowledged poetry but also the scruffier precincts of dramatic poetry: as Hamlet says of the traveling players, they are "the abstract and brief chronicles of the time: after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live".
The poet stakes his claim in the very first line: not the golden but the gilded monuments are cited, suggesting that the princes have a veneer of glory but nothing substantial beneath that. Once the princes are safely under the marble, who's paying attention to them? The stone is unswept, smeared & dirty with the passage of time (sluttish here suggests slovenly or slatternly, not sexually promiscuous – though that more modern definition isn't really inappropriate; there are lots of princes & rulers, & Time promiscuously gathers them all in, without too much distinction).
The second quatrain moves beyond the general forward movement & neglect of Time to the specific example of War, deliberately trying to root out – as every gardener knows, that means to destroy utterly – the memorials & memory of the previous regimes. The mention of overturning statues must be a recollection of the smashing of images that followed Henry VIII's break with the Catholic church & the subsequent imposition of a Protestant church on England: the references to war & the destruction of monuments are not hypothetical possibilities here, but actual events in living memory in a state perpetually besieged by internal & external forces.
In the third quatrain & the concluding couplet, Shakespeare moves beyond the forgetfulness caused by Time's regular passing & the active destruction of war into a grandly eschatological view: he is positioning himself (more accurately, his words) against death & ultimately the end of the world & the Last Judgment (this was a world that believed, though perhaps only on an official level, that Christ would return to judge the living & the dead); he asserts that his lines will last until the very end, the destruction & transfiguration, of the known world.
But of course it isn't accurate to say that poetry (particularly in the days when printing was fairly new & not inevitable for a writer, who, in the early modern world, often circulated their works in manuscript among their friends) outlives the depredations of Time & political or religious attempts to wipe it out: we have only to look at the huge gaps in what is left of even the most celebrated authors of Greece & Rome, or the chancy survival in a single manuscript of such now-celebrated works at Beowulf or Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, to realize how great a role chance plays in the survival of even the greatest works, particularly from the time before printing became widespread.
Is there some fear of loss lying, however deeply submerged, behind the bravado of this poem's assertions? Counterbalancing the confident assertion of the poet's power in this sonnet is a parallel track: he is addressing a lover. How much of the poem's forceful assertion is the poet's effort to persuade the lover (& perhaps himself) that he is worth paying attention to? From this perspective, his insistence can seem perhaps a bit overdone, in an effort to persuade this other person, who may or may not be responsive: I am giving you eternal life through my words, he insists; you will become an epitome for future lovers. The poet dismisses the chance of princes against Time's indifference & destruction, but does so while pleading for his lover to love him back, or at least pay some attention to his words. An indifferent lover can be harsher than princes or Time.
The ironic thing is that, against the odds – England's dicey state, Shakespeare's ambiguous status as poet & player (& therefore not a serious, powerful man), the tenuous state of the English language & literature – his words did come true. These lines will indeed last as long as English is read, which will, most likely, be until the world blows up in some way. The lover he addresses has indeed achieved immortality through his words, & lives in the eyes of, if not lovers, then lovers of poetry. But no one knows who exactly the lover is. There is much speculation on the identity of the "Dark Lady of the Sonnets" as well as that of the young man some of them are addressed to, but nothing is certain. There's nothing in this poem that even tells us whether it's addressed to the lady or the youth. The unnamed "lover", who may or may not even have been a specific person (Shakespeare might have been addressing some idealized but non-existent lover), has been transubstantiated into an eternally dazzling (but anonymous) image of The Loved Object.
There are many editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, of course, but I use the Signet Classic edition. This is Sonnet 55.
