This beautiful sonnet deals with the immortality of the person loved, of the feelings she inspires and of the unchanging nature of the poem itself. Its central metaphor dates back two thousand years to Simonides, and has travelled down the centuries and across the frontiers of the Greek, Latin, Italian, French and English languages.
There is no finer example of the numerous threads that form the very fabric of European culture. This weave, this “indestructible monument” made of words, spanning time and space, from Simonides to du Bellay and Shakespeare, is Europe’s cultural unity!