Sonnet 35 by William Shakespeare

First published: 1609, in Sonnets

Type of poem: Sonnet

The Poem

Sonnet 35, “No more be griev’d at that which thou hast done,” is written to a young man, the poet’s friend and nominal addressee or auditor of sonnets 1 through 126, by far the largest section of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence. The friend presumably is the “Mr. W. H.” of the inscribed dedication of Thomas Thorpe’s 1609 printing of the sonnets. This mysterious figure’s identity has never been incontrovertibly established, although the scholarly consensus has focused on two candidates: Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton (1573-1624), and William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke (1580-1630), both of whom were patrons of the poet-dramatist.

The true identity of the young man is of relative unimportance critically; in fact, some scholars have suggested that the youth might even be an idealized literary figure rather a real person. However, Sonnet 35 argues, as do some related sonnets, that the friendship is at times strained and certainly less than idyllic, giving it the semblance of an actual relationship. Although the young man’s looks bear the stamp of perfection, he is not without character flaws. This poem arises from some unidentified hurt inflicted on the poet by the friend, the source of a momentary estrangement that is dealt with in Sonnets 33 through 42.

In Sonnet 35, the friend is grief-stricken by his trespass, and the poet attempts to assuage his friend’s guilt through clever sophistry, reasoning that he himself must bear some of the responsibility for his friend’s offense. Because the friend’s transgression seems to involve sexual betrayal, a “sensual fault,” scholars have traditionally speculated that the friend may have seduced the poet’s mistress or been seduced by her, although a few commentators have concluded that the sexual suggestion is homoerotic.

If the wrong done the poet is moot, its effect is not. The friend is “grieved” by it. The poet argues, through parallel examples, that the faults of men have analogues in nature, even in the most beautiful of things: roses and buds, silver fountains, sun and moon. These images of nature’s perfection are no less subject to flaws than humans are. The rose stem bears wounding thorns, clouds and eclipses dim the beauty of moon and sun, canker worms devour sweet buds, and the water of the silver fountains may, at times, grow muddy. The poet then argues that he is also blameworthy, since he excuses his friend’s fault with his flawed comparisons and his faulty logic, which speciously justify his friend’s betrayal. He is thus corrupted by his need to excuse his friend’s faults.

Line 8, one of the most difficult of lines in Shakespeare’s sonnets, has frequently been emended to read “Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are,” with its implication that the friend’s transgression was not significant enough to require the poet’s reasoned defense, one that turns the wounded party into the wrongdoer’s chief advocate. The poet, drawn by the conflicting demands of “love and hate,” is put in the untenable position of defending the “sweet theefe” who has stolen his mistress’s affections, and he chastises himself as an “accessary” to the friend’s crime.

Forms and Devices

Sonnet 35 is in the English or Shakespearean sonnet form, as are all but three of the poems in Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence. This form consists of fourteen iambic pentameter lines arranged as three quatrains and a couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. Sonnet 35 is a very regular example. Its phrasing is rigorously maintained by end-of-line punctuation marking full caesuras; Shakespeare employs no enjambment or run-on lines. Each line is a whole syntactical unit, usually a dependent clause. The rhymes, too, are regular, although modern pronunciation turns “compare” and “sins are” of lines 6 and 8 and “Advocate” and “hate” of lines 10 and 12 into apparent sight rhymes rather than true rhyme. There is also some metrical inversion, beginning in line 2, with “Roses,” a trochee. Similar variations in meter occur in lines 3, 6, 8, 10, 13, and 14. Metrical inversion is common throughout Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence. It is often used to counterpoint the basic iambic scheme, which might otherwise become too monotonous.

The sonnet’s regularity complements its basic idea. The poem takes the form of logical discourse, of a legal argument, ostensibly rational rather than emotional. Although the poet admits to using what elsewhere he calls “false compare” (Sonnet 130), he starts out to justify his friend’s betrayal by arguing that nothing is perfect. In the manner of much Elizabethan verse, the lyric uses multiple examples from nature, although as either analogies or analogues they are clearly strained if not completely inappropriate. The fault of the young man lies in his own character, whereas the analogies in nature involve such phenomena as an eclipse of the sun or moon and the destruction of a flower bud by a canker worm. Such “flaws,” except for the rose’s thorns, are not intrinsic in the object but are introduced by some external or invasive presence. However, at a metaphorical level, that presence—the shadow on the sun or the mud in the water of the silver fountain—might be interpreted as the “Dark Lady,” the poet’s mistress and the corrupting influence on the young man. Elsewhere in the sequence, including Sonnet 34, Shakespeare uses the sun as metaphor for his friend—thus, when read in sequence, Sonnet 35 takes advantage of resonant associations established in the lyrics preceding it.

In the reasoning that follows the examples of lines 2 through 4, the poet turns the argument against himself, claiming that he is flawed for “authorizing” his friend’s wrongdoing through an involuted reasoning that uses “sence” or logic to justify his friend’s “sensuall fault.” He thereby becomes both plaintiff and the offender’s advocate, a paradoxical situation arising from the “civill war” that pits his feelings of “love and hate” against each other. These ambivalent feelings are very succinctly expressed in the vivid “sweet theefe” oxymoron of the last line. There is perhaps a hint of self-contempt in the alliterative use of sibilants in lines 7 through 9, the hissing sound of words in phrases like “salving thy amissse” and “excusing their sins,” tingeing the poem with some self-disgust. Ironically, although the poet is clearly the wounded party, he seems more willing to forgive his friend than he is himself for doing so. Such convoluted sophistry was part of the rhetorical tradition so much admired by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. It provided evidence of a poet’s invention and wit, though to a modern ear it may seem somewhat contrived and insincere.