Overcoming Mortality

The wish of overcoming mortality and gaining eternity is as old as the awareness of death. Many cultures and times have tried to succeed in this by various methods. Some built their dead enormous graves and buried their entire homes with them to guarantee a comfortable afterlife. Others mummified their corpses so that they might life forever. There is no religion that does not know the thought of afterlife, eternity or rebirth – be it the antique underworld Hades surrounded by the river Styx, the ancestor worship of many natural religions, the Buddhist belief of rebirth and incarnation or the Christian idea of eternal life in heaven or hell.
Besides the religious belief, however, there was another way for gaining eternity, especially in the upper classes of cultural western societies. They meant to gain eternity by creating something – a painting, sculpture or poem – that will last for centuries, perhaps for ever, and thus reminding the posterity of it’s creator. Some, however, used this method not for themselves but for others. They eternalised another person through their work of art for instance by praising the beauty or the virtues of a beloved or honoured person in verse. The main literal convention for doing so was the poem. Being a very common and possibly the greatest form for a love poem it is not surprising that the motive of giving immortality to the beauty of the beloved person is a very current motive in the sonnet, especially the Renaissance sonnet sequences. One of the greatest sonneteers in the English language, however, is one mostly known as the writer of plays like ‘Hamlet’, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘King Lear’ and many, many others: William Shakespeare.