Sonnet Number Fifty-five

This sonnet to me was very hard to understand. What I got
out of it was that the speaker was making the boy immortal by writing poems
about him. The speaker thinks that poems will live on forever and therefore
when this poem lives forever, so will the boy. He writes about how man-made
objects such as statues which honor princes. These objects crumble to dust over
time, but poems will last forever. The speaker says that even after death the
boy will continue on and live in the poem, making him immortal. The speaker also
says that the boy will dwell in lovers’ eyes. I wasn’t exactly sure what to
think of this as the end of the sonnet. I think that the speaker sees the boy
having a love that people of the future will see as perfect and want a love
like the boy. I think the speaker is telling the boy that people will admire
him and look to him the same way people look at statues of great war heroes and
aspire to be like him.