Those petty wrongs that liberty commits,
When I am sometime absent from thy heart,
Thy beauty and thy years full well befits,
For still temptation follows where thou art.
Gentle thou art and therefore to be won,
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed;
And when a woman woos, what woman’s son
Will sourly leave her till she have prevailed?
Ay me! but yet thou mightest my seat forbear,
And chide try beauty and thy straying youth,
Who lead thee in their riot even there
Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth,
Hers by thy beauty tempting her to thee,
Thine, by thy beauty being false to me.
The saga of betrayal continues, but now the lover’s crime has been softened, in name at least, to one of those ‘pretty wrongs that liberty commits’, and more extenuating circumstances are found to justify the wrong and show that the youth himself was hardly responsible for the deed. It was his youth and his beauty which were responsible, for such qualities are rare and even though they may not be active agents they are always open to attack from preying women.
Yet even so, muses the poet, you might have restrained yourself, and held back from this cruel betrayal, for it has caused you to break your own vows and her to break hers – a two-fold crime which is doubly heinous and for which you are responsible (the woman’s guilt in the betrayal is not here taken into account. But see however sonnet 152).
It is interesting to see that this sonnet ends on a note of accusation, a comparatively rare event, for reconciliation or self effacement are the usual outcomes of those situations where fault has been found. The concluding couplets of 69, 84 and 94 are also critical of the youth, but in a more general sense. Here the accusation of troth-breaking is more specific and hurtful, a potential cause of a permanent divorce of the loving relationship.
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