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Shakespeare's Sonnets

Chapter 59: LVIII
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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.

LVIII

That god forbid, that made me first your slave,
I should in thought control your times of pleasure,
Or at your hand the account of hours to crave,
Being your vassal, bound to stay your leisure!
O! let me suffer, being at your beck,
The imprison’d absence of your liberty;
And patience, tame to sufferance, bide each check,
Without accusing you of injury.
Be where you list, your charter is so strong
That you yourself may privilage your time
To what you will; to you it doth belong
Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime.
    I am to wait, though waiting so be hell,
    Not blame your pleasure be it ill or well.