William Shakespeare's Sonnet #55

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William Shakespeare’s Sonnet #55 is a Shakespearian sonnet. It contains

three quatrains, or four line stanzas, and ends with a couplet. The

poem is written in iambic pentameter

William Shakespeare’s Sonnet #55 is a Shakespearian sonnet. It

contains three quatrains, or four line stanzas, and ends with a

couplet. The poem is written in iambic pentameter. The speaker is

the older man. This is the same speaker in many of Shakespeare’s

sonnets. In this sonnet the speaker is telling the young man,

beautiful, male addressee that he is not sharing his beauty with the

world, but is selfishly keeping it all to himself. He’s explaining to

the addressee that he needs to have children to spread his beauty and

share it with the world.

In the first quatrain the speaker is telling the addressee about how

he will live eternally in the poem. Shakespeare writes, “Not marble

nor the gilded monuments/ of princes shall outlive this powerful

rhyme” (Shakespeare lines 1-2). He uses a metaphor comparing the

beauty of the young man to “upswept stone besmeared with sluttish

time” (Shake...

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