Theme: Loss of Muse
Content: The author cannot add more to the subject's worth so advises the subject to simply look in their mirror for confirmation of their visual beauty in a disjointed sonnet reflecting the author's current loss of inventiveness, probably deliberately.
Alack, what poverty
my
muse brings forth
That, having such a scope to show her pride,
The argument all bare
is of more worth
Than when it hath my added praise beside!
- The author feels his talent is currently so poor that the subject's worth is better on its own instead of being augmented by his poetic contribution.
- Paradox between the bare argument providing more worth.
- Probable pun on poetry in poverty.
- This is an or sonnet providing assonance to the central theme of wanting more of what is lacking: forth, worth.
- This quatrain posits the problem.
O blame me not if I no more
can
write!
Look in your glass and there appears a face
That overgoes my blunt invention quite,
Dulling my lines and doing me disgrace.
- This quatrain posits the solution: forget the author's verse, just look in the mirror.
- The wanting of more is repeated in his quatrain.
- Line 5 really sticks out as an incongruous outburst and disturbs the flow of the rest of the quatrain. Shakespeare seems to be playing a game of deliberately compiling a mediocre sonnet to reflect the current loss of his muse.
- The author feels disgrace at his inadequate efforts of reflecting the subject's graces.
Were it not sinful then, striving to mend,
To mar
the subject that before
was well?
For
to no other pass my verses tend
Than of your graces
and your gifts to tell;
- more has explicitly left him completely here but is echoed in before and For.
- Also, the author's attempts to add more to the subject morphs into him marring the subject.
And more,
much more, than
in my verse can sit
Your own glass shows
you when you
look in it.
- More repeated twice in the couplet brings to 4 the number if times it is explicitly used in the sonnet.
- The glass reflects shows you from you look in it.
- A doggerel of an ending, surely deliberately manufactured by the author. He's so good he can deliberately contrive a mediocre sonnet to convey his self-alleged lack of talent.
Critical text © NigelDavies.home@Virgin.net