An Audio Guide to Poetry Recitation - 24. "Sonnet 55"

An Audio Guide to Poetry Recitation - 24. "Sonnet 55"


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Although the sonnet was invented in Renaissance Italy, over the past five hundred years it has become the most popular form of English language poetry. A sonnet consists fourteen lines of rhymed  iambic pentameter. But the reason that it is popular is that poets discovered right away that it was the perfect vessel to express intense emotion, especially about love and romance and all the problems that they bring. The most famous writer of sonnet in English is William Shakespeare. Here is James Earl Jones reading Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 55.

Sonnet 55
by William Shakespeare
[Read by James Earl Jones]

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.