Theme: Idle Hours
Content: Another specious sonnet that claims no objection to the subject's absence and doings but in so doing progressively reveals it.
Being your slave,
what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and
times
of your desire?
I have no precious time
at
all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require;
- The first 2 quatrains are concerned with time that is idle without the demands of the subject, who again is absent.
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock
for
you,
Nor think the
bitterness
of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu.
- The author says he wouldn't dare to write poetry about doomsday when he is occupied with something as dull as watching the clock waiting for his subject's return - a sarcastic comment in light of the fact that in writing this sonnet he is not just watching the hours pass on the clock atall.
- He does not think bitterness but perhaps feels it. More likely, he is saying what his subject wants to hear in a show of apparent obsequiousness that thinly disguises an intellect far greater than one that would be content to wait on their master.
Nor dare I question with my jealous
thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But like a sad
slave
stay
and think of nought
Save, where you
are, how happy you make those.
- The author now reveals emotions with jealous thought. This again is probably specious though - saying what his attention-seeking and egotistical patron/master wishes to hear.
- The issue of time is now replaced with the whereabouts and doings of the subject.
- The author identified himself as Being your slave in Q1 but is now only like a sad slave.
- The sad slave morphs to Save.
So true a fool
is
love that in your Will,
Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.
- The author now regards love as a fool so implicating himself as a foolish slave in love. The author disassociates himself from the identity of a fool though, assigning that to love. If the author does not actually love the patron/subject then the author cannot be the fool. Again, a specious argument saying the opposite of what the words superficially appear to mean.
- Pun on the author's name in your Will, especially as that syllable is stressed.
- Confirmation of no ill thought but failure to deny that there is ill feeling.
Critical text © NigelDavies.home@Virgin.net