Theme:      Locked-up Treasure
Content:    A specious sonnet that initially suggests the subject is the author's treasure whom he can see at leisure, but it is the subject who is in control and determines when, and if, they meet.

• The author here compares himself with the rich signifying that he himself is not rich.
• He also compares his occasional meeting with his subject with the way those who have a treasure look at it only occasionally so as not to blunt the pleasure of doing so.
• The author here is blessed as the rich.
• The up-locked treasure introduces the concept of the subject being held by the author and removed from others' view. There are suggestions of jealousy on the part of the author developing here.
• There may be sexual innuendo at play here aswell though as treasure is Elizabethan slang for the female genitalia. In fact, the whole sonnet can be interpreted as being heavily laden with heterosexual connotations especially with the potential for sexual euphemisms that "key", "sweet up-locked treasure", "For blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure", "seldom coming", "By new unfolding his imprisoned pride", "being had, to triumph" provide.

• The opening So is heavily alliterated in this quatrain.
• In this quatrain, blessed is so rare that it is not present.
• A carcanet is a collar of jewels but is also from the French that originally meant a convict's collar thus the author likens the treasure to that of a convict.
• The jewels are thinly placed in the carcanet just as the meetings between the author and subject are deliberately placed thinly throughout the long year.

• So returns to open the final quatrain and is repreented in other words such as some and imprisoned.
• The chest here is now blest as it controls when the subject sees the author. So, the suggestion in Q1 that the subject is the locked up treasure of the author is revealed to be wishful thinking as it is the subject who is in control of the times that they meet.
• Conveying the sense of hiding the subject/treasure from others, the robe is literally hidden within wardrobe.
• Additionally, wardrobe hides the word rob, which may be a pun on the subject's name who may have been Robert Dudley, Duke of Northumberland.
• The author's possessiveness is amply illustrated here with the carcanet idea developing into a chest as a gaol in which the treasure is imprisoned.

• A variant on the Biblical "Blessed are the meek..." type of maxims.
• The subject is now blessed. Blessedness has transferred from the author to the chest to the subject.
• Possession is all to the author: the Being had.
• But even if one doesn't possess, there is hope, not loss.
• This sonnet may allude to Pandora's box / chest in which the last thing left after its other contents had escaped, was hope.