Shakespeare Illimitable

A number of Shakespeare’s sonnets assert that they will transcend the poet’s death and become a record for all eternity(15,18,19, 55, 60, 63, 81,101). The speakers in these sonnets denote graphically the destructive force of Time, but always subordinate it to the eternity of a language cast in terse dramas about life, love, aging, death. Sonnet number 55, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments” best illustrates the poet’s triumph over Time’s various powers that efface marble monuments and grind men and women along with their most exalted deeds into dust:  


SONNET 55  

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents 
Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time. 
When wasteful war shall statues overturn, 
And broils root out the work of masonry, 
Nor Mars his sword 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.


Not to be outdone by marbled monuments that preserve the memory and record of men and women, Shakespeare parades his words against and beyond “death” and “all-oblivious enmity.” However, like those monuments to great men and woman, the stately grandeur of this poem might be said to elevate it to an impersonal aesthetic that sacrifices emotion to monumental nobility and fortitude. Such an elevation, befitting in say, Milton’s sonnet “To the Lord General Cromwell,” would be incompatible with a love poem. However, the diction (and thus tone) of the last line softens the imagery of time’s violence and the resolute momentum of the poem as a “living record” that marches stalwartly forward. It seems, that by line fourteen, the speaker has won his battle. Now he can breathe more comfortably, relent in his attack on Time and embrace the future readers who will “dwell” with him and his lover in the illimitable world the those fourteen lines create