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Immortality
"To the Memory of My Beloved" isn't really focused on death, which is weird for an elegy. Instead, Jonson devotes a lot of time and energy to talking about how to keep an author who has died alive—so to speak—for future generations. He raises interesting questions about the best way to honor and memorialize a great writer and whether or not authors, who he claims live on in their work, can ever really die. Cue creepy ghost noises here.
The First Folio, the book that will keep Shakespeare's legacy alive, is the "monument without a tomb" that Jonson speaks of in line 23.
Books do not immortalize their authors as Jonson claims; he is only saying that because he is an author himself.
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