I came back to this sonnet by Shakespeare a couple of days ago. It seems suitable for an autumn day, slightly melancholy, looking back over ‘things past’. It still strikes me as incredible that something written so many hundred years ago can still speak to us so vividly and movingly.
I read a critique of it commenting on the legalistic language used, sessions, summon up, account, all losses are restored, as if there is a metaphorical weighing up the balance of two sides in some sort of ‘grievance‘; it’s as if there has been a falling out over not money but love, waste, expense, cancelled, paid before, tell o’er (tell as in counting or adding up).
However, there is a sort of happy ending, a sort of melancholic happy ending ‘…all losses are restor’d and sorrows end’
Sonnet 30
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.
William Shakespeare
Lois Elsden 