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Shakespeare's Sonnets

Chapter 136: CXXXV
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About This Book

A sequence of lyric sonnets presents a speaker who examines love, beauty, time, and mortality through intimate, shifting addresses. Many poems urge a beloved to preserve beauty through progeny, while others meditate on aging and the ravages of time; a contrasting strand records erotic passion, jealousy, and betrayal. The pieces vary tone from pleading to defiance and experiment with sonnet form and rhetorical argument, often asserting poetry’s power to memorialize. Recurring images and contrapuntal voices probe desire, artistic rivalry, and the tension between physical love and spiritual admiration.

CXXXV

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy ‘Will,’
And ‘Will’ to boot, and ‘Will’ in over-plus;
More than enough am I that vex’d thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus.
Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?
Shall will in others seem right gracious,
And in my will no fair acceptance shine?
The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,
And in abundance addeth to his store;
So thou, being rich in ‘Will,’ add to thy ‘Will’
One will of mine, to make thy large will more.
    Let no unkind ‘No’ fair beseechers kill;
    Think all but one, and me in that one ‘Will.’