The speaker compares his own body to a painter’s studio, with his eyes painting the fair youth and storing the image in his heart. Since the speaker’s heart is filled with love for the fair youth, the fair youth’s visage is a “window” to the interiority of the speaker, evoking the classic conceit of the eyes being windows to the soul. However, there is also the idea that while the speaker is open about his feelings, the fair youth is closed off and simply reflects the speaker’s own feelings back to him. The final lines further emphasize this reality. The speaker admits that, while he has fallen for the beauty of the fair youth, he may not know the fair youth’s heart.

The speaker uses the metaphors of a forgetful actor and a raging beast to convey the state of being unable to portray his feelings accurately. He worries that the depth of his feelings cannot be communicated through words alone and beseeches his beloved to “hear with his eyes” and see the love in the way the speaker looks at him. This is a play on the metaphor that the eyes are the window to the soul, a metaphor found in literature dating back to Roman times. The speaker personifies his loving looks as messengers of his affection that seek out and “plead” with the fair youth. The speaker hopes for “recompense,” or reciprocal affection, from his beloved.

The speaker derides the habits of other poets who he claims are “stirr’d by a painted beauty,” or inspired by artificial comparisons between their subjects and beautiful things. The speaker, despite engaging in this same sort of poetic comparison throughout the sonnet sequence, believes it is disingenuous to compare the beauty of the fair youth to celestial bodies and natural wonders. He claims that he is “true in love” and is not trying to “sell” anything, so he has no need to exaggerate. Human descriptions of his beloved are more genuine and beautiful than extravagant comparisons, since the fair youth is already beautiful in his unadorned state.

In a likely allusion to the stories of Greek authors and biographers Homer and Plutarch, the speaker contemplates the warrior who, although victorious in thousands of battles, loses his honor after one defeat. The speaker argues that unlike these warriors, his “honour” will never be “razed quite” from history books, because the fair youth loves him unconditionally.

The word “vassalage” refers to the feudal system in which a peasant is protected by the lord on whose land he farms. Here, the speaker compares himself to the vassal who has sworn his loyalty to the “Lord of my love,” or the fair youth. Such a power dynamic—between the feudal lord and his servant—suggests that the speaker feels inferior or weak compared to his aristocratic love. The source of power is twofold: the youth controls the speaker’s affections and, as his patron, may control his livelihood as well.

In an attempt to demonstrate the effect of the fair youth’s unreciprocated love, the speaker explains that he is restless both day and night. He personifies day and night as misanthropic individuals who “consent” and “shake hands to torture” him. In the final couplet, the speaker emphasizes this theme through alliteration and the use of consonant-laden monosyllabic and disyllabic words, which draw the sentences out. With the repetition of the d, s, and l sounds in lines 13 and 14, readers must take pause and slow their reading speed, a process which mimics the speaker’s arduous and enduring grief.

For in-depth look at “Sonnet 29,” read our expert analysis on its own page.

The speaker’s plight, of being forced to relive painful experiences over and over again, resembles Macbeth’s conundrum in act V, scene III of Shakespeare’s 1623 play Macbeth, in which Macbeth asks the Doctor: "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, / Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, / Raze out the written troubles of the brain, / And with some sweet oblivious antidote / Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart?" In both texts, Shakespeare reflects on the memories that can return to haunt and torment the soul.

The word "glass" refers to the speaker’s mirror. Throughout the sonnet, mirrors are a motif that signify aging and decay. Notice the disconnect between the speaker's perception of himself and the image he sees in the mirror of his aging self. This signifies his blindness in the face of Time, which in turn undermines his argument that he can halt decay with poetry and love.

Throughout the first line, specifically the phrase “sessions of sweet silent thought,” the speaker employs alliteration of the s sounds. This consonance is continued throughout the following three lines in words like “summon,” “remembrance,” “things,” “past,” “sigh,” “sought,” woes,” “time’s,” and “waste.” This literary device creates a wistful, seemingly nostalgic mood of solitude and reflection.

This line as well as the next eight lines are littered with “o” vowel sounds in words like “woe,” “fore,” “foregone,” “drown,” and “fore-bemoaned moan.” The subtle use of this sound evokes the wails or moans one might release during the mourning process.

Through this metaphor, Shakespeare compares the pains we initially suffer to a bill that needs to be paid. Regardless of how many times the speaker pays it, the bill returns again and again for payment. The speaker laments the grief he cannot seem to relinquish and the emotional toll of continually recalling past sorrows.

Although Shakespeare's sonnets are all predominantly in iambic pentameter, he frequently breaks the iambic rhythm to emphasize a particular thought or highlight a change of mood. The first words of these two lines, "Wishing" and "Featur'd,” substitute the typical iambs with trochees, metrical feet which place the stress on the first rather than the second syllable. In turn, the speaker changes the tone from one of disillusionment to one of hope and reconciliation.

A lark is a type of ground-dwelling songbird. To signify rejuvenation and renewal, the speaker offers a stark shift from the gloomy and morbid language used throughout the sonnet by introducing the simile of a lark singing at daybreak. Notice as well how the repetition of s sounds in words such as “sullen,” “sings,” “hymns,” “heaven’s” suggests the lark’s call. The use of the word “sweet” in the following line serves as an echo to the sound of the singing lark.

Pronounced with four syllables to satisfy the iambic pentameter rhythm, the word “fore-bemoaned” describes an expression of deep grief. The prefix “fore” means “previously” and suggests the many “moans” the speaker has already experienced throughout his life and which return to haunt him again.

The metaphor of death having a “dateless night” suggests that death cannot be divided into days, weeks, or months. Death, as the speaker intimates, is at once perpetual and eternal and yet also empty of time’s flow, standing as it does outside the chronologies of mortal life.

Scottish writer, F. K. Scott Moncrieff, borrowed the phrase “remembrance of things past” for the title of his translation of Marcel’s Proust’s seven-volume novel À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

In a metaphor characteristic of Shakespeare, the speaker draws on a universal human experience. Here, the speaker conjures a terrifying moment of waking up in the middle of the night in a strange, pitch-dark room. The speaker is overcome with a metaphorical blindness even though his eyes are “open wide.”