Sonnet 81
Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
mortality
immortality
poetry
memory
Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read,
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse
When all the breathers of this world are dead;
You still shall live--such virtue hath my pen--
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.
What It Means
Either Shakespeare outlives the young man and writes his epitaph, or the young man outlives Shakespeare and Shakespeare's name is forgotten. Either way, the poem wins. Whoever reads this in the future — and people will be reading it — will see the young man's name. Shakespeare's name might disappear; the young man's won't. The poem is the insurance policy for immortality.
Context
Part of the Fair Youth sequence. The sonnet makes an unusually direct prediction about its own lasting power.
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