Sonnet 55

Sonnet 55 continues with one of the speaker’s favorite subjects of time, and is very much linked with Sonnet 18 with the idea that poetry outlasts time. In the first quatrain, the speaker says that not even marble or monuments will be able to outlive this poetry and, therefore, the subject will be reincarnated in the lines as well. The second quatrain talks about how the subject’s memory can never be destroyed, because his exsistence will always live on in these poems. The third quatrain continues talking about how the speaker will never really die, and that generations to come will praise him. The couplet ends the sonnet by saying that until Judgement Day, the subject will live on and be praised by the readers of this poem. I find this sonnet quite ironic because although the poem has indeed lived on, defeating time, the reader knows very little, if not nothing, about the subject – and therefore, his memory really hasn’t. The speaker says that it will be the subject whoever is forever praised because of these poems, when in reality it has become the opposite. Instead, the writer, Shakespeare, has become the one that has been reincarnated through his own work.