Sonnet 55's tone is one of somber celebration, appropriate for praising someone of high status. All of the poet's allusions are solemn and concerned with death. "Gilded monuments" are built after the princes referred to have died, and war is a primary instrument of death.
But Shakespeare writes the verse to literally immortalize his subject, saying that none of the ravages of time or conflict can erase the praiseworthiness of the one referenced. What is interesting here is the final couplet. Although the rest of the sonnet could easily refer to the poet's patron, or some high official, the final line, "You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes" seems to indicate that, instead, it refers to a romantic object. The line is, in fact, in contrast with the rest of the sonnet, and we continue to speculate why Shakespeare would choose to comment on a personal relationship so formally.
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 (7-12).The reason his object will triumph and survive over all these obstacles, even while others are crushed and forgotten, is because he/she lives on in this poem:
So till the judgment that yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.Because the poet holds this strong belief, he has hope and confidence that both his words and his love will last - and this tone comes across in the sonnet.
What language and tone is used in Shakespeare's Sonnet 55?
Shakespeare's language and tone in Sonnet 55 are, to an extent, more distant and austere than one finds in many of the sonnets. One notices that the speaker addresses the beloved, the Fair Youth, with "you" instead of "thou." Although the shift in the standard second-person pronouns was already occurring in the seventeenth century, "you" was still a more formal, respectful, and less intimate manner of address.
The speaker's tone clearly shows his awe of the object of his love and praise. The comparison is made with matters of state—princes and war—and with mythology in the reference to Mars, the god of war. And yet, at the end, in the final couplet, one can see a softening of the language and a humbler tone, given...
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the reference to the Last Judgment. It is as if the speaker has yielded his elevated ranking of the Fair Youth in deference to God's ranking.
The principal idea expressed in Sonnet 55, I would argue, is that poetry and art in general can confer immortality upon an individual in a way that the material world cannot. It's interesting to compare this poem with a very well-known sonnet by another English writer, Edmund Spenser. One of the most famous sonnets in Spenser's Amoretti begins "One day I wrote her name upon the strand, / But came the waves and washed it away." The speaker is then chided by his beloved for vainly believing he can "immortalize" her. He counters that it's not the physical depiction of her name but rather his verse, his art, that will make the idea of her live forever. Shakespeare's theme is similar to Spenser's: "marble and gilded monuments," though stronger and more durable, are analogous to a name written in the sand. The material world will pass away, but art, "this powerful rhyme," is the means by which the one being addressed (the so-called Fair Youth) "shall shine more bright" than stone until Judgment Day.