Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, June 4th, 2004. Today's poem by William Shakespeare is Sonnet 55. I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and read it once more.

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, besmeared 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.

Against 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, to the judgment that yourself arise,

you live in this and dwell in lover's eyes.

While I will grant to Sonnet 18 a catchier opening line, for my money, I prefer Sonnet 55,

doing something similar in its form and construction, but I think the extended metaphor is a little more satisfying.

So yesterday we looked at Sonnet 18 in which the speaker presents the problem of the beloved's mortality and inevitability or the inevitability of her fading beauty.

Here, the same problem is presented, but the solution is also the same.

Well, the solution is also the same, but it's contrasted against a different backdrop.

Rather than simply saying, I'll write a poem about you,

and that will make your beauty last. Here, other forms or other methods of preserving the

beloved's beauty are compared and contrasted. So the statuary of marble or gilded monuments, the material, hard,

durable means of capturing the beloved's beauty in really a more intuitive way are presented at first.

If you want to preserve someone's beauty, what better way than in an image?

You can look upon it and have the actual substance of the beauty, the details, the symmetry

of the face, the grace of the form presented to

your senses, but the speaker contends even those things can be destroyed. Time wears away stone,

...